And A Very Good Time It Was: A Short Life... By Tim Miller Publisher, Six Galley Press

And A Very Good Time It Was: A Short Life of James Joyce
By Tim Miller
Publisher, Six Galley Press
http://www.sixgallerypress.com
Technically Joyce’s life is pretty boring. Even his rebellion against the church and departure from
Ireland appears tame nowadays, where the “exiled artist” or “rebellious former-Catholic” have
become cliches. But what little excitement there was remains in their many departures: from
Ireland in 1904 to occupied France in 1940. In between, Joyce did his best as a father and
husband, was frequently irresponsible with the money he made, and he wrote his books. As if to
defend himself he once said “Bach led a very uneventful life,”1 but as uneventful as his life may
seem, I can think of no other writer who yields so much through a parallel study of his life and his
work, and consequently I can think of few lives as inspiring for myself or any writer.
In the short sketch to follow I hope to show a writer who justified the commonplace and
supposedly ordinary with his life as well as his work. The genuine quality Samuel Beckett
attributed to Finnegans Wake speaks for the rest of life as well: “His writing is not about
something. It is that something itself.”2
Joyce was born into the typical Irish combination of poverty, Catholicism, and alcoholism. His
father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was born in 1849, an only child who ended up with ten children of
his own. He never finished college, but while there dabbled in areas (medicine, singing, and the
theater) his son James would years later. He was twenty-one when his father died, and inherited
the properties in Cork which he would sell in time as the family’s finances grew worse and worse.
His education came from his life in Cork that furnished him with an encyclopedic knowledge of
local trivia his son later employed in his novels.
When John Joyce met and became engaged to Mary Jane Murray, he had already been
engaged twice3. Neither family approved of the marriage, and while Mary’s family eventually
acquiesced, John’s mother (who thought the Murrays beneath her) never did, and died soon after
the wedding in 1880. His heavy drinking and irresponsibility with money were at least countered
by a steady job—he had worked indefatigably for the Liberal Party during the general election of
1880, and was rewarded with a life-position in the Dublin office of the Collector of Rates.
After the first Joyce son was born (and soon died) in 1881, James Augustine was born on
February 2, 1882. Besides Bloomsday (June 16), no date is more important in the Joycean
universe than his birthday. He would later do his best to have both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
published on that day.
In September, 1888, Joyce began his schooling at Clongowes Wood College, forty miles
from home in County Kildare. The school was actually a castle built in the late Middle Ages, and
it wasn’t until 1814, after changing hands many times and nearly being destroyed, that it was sold
to a Jesuit who established the school.4 Indeed, no matter what Joyce had to say about the religion
the Jesuits promoted, he counted his education from them as a point of pride for the rest of this
life.
Many incidents in Portrait are drawn from real-life experiences from Clongowes: one,
specifically, being pandied by Father Dolan (in real life Father Daly) for inattention to his studies,
became an initial instance of the injustice of his religion and country. A period of homesickness
passed in time, and his letters home became, in a priest’s words, like a grocer’s list5; but this was
more a comment, as his father knew, on his son’s attention to detail. “If that fellow was dropped
in the middle of the Sahara,” John Joyce said, “he’d sit, be God, and make a map of it.”6
In 1887 Mrs. Hearn Conway had been hired as the children’s governess. Appearing in
Portrait as Dante, this is less an homage to the Florentine poet than “the Southern Cork
pronunciation of ‘the Auntie’ as ‘de Auntie’.”7 She was a terrifically devout Catholic and
nationalist who took the Joyce children to museums and, with her religious anecdotes, instilled in
young James his lifelong fear of thunderstorms. The scene over Christmas dinner in Portrait,
where the family reacts to the fall of Charles Steward Parnell, was also based on a real event.
Parnell, who emerged as the leading figure in the Irish Parliamentary Party, came to shame after
his affair with the married Kitty O’Shea became public on Christmas Eve, 1889. The two
reactions to his downfall were (Ms. Conway’s) to side with the clerics who condemned him or
(John Joyce’s) to forever support their now-fallen leader. The young Joyce wrote a poem on the
death of Parnell two years later, of which Richard Ellmann makes the point that even at nine
Joyce is making a connection between a classical figure and a contemporary counterpart, Parnell
now a lofty eagle (and later Caesar), as later he was to equate Leopold Bloom with Ulysses.8
With the government now in different hands, Joyce’s father lost his position at the Rates
Office. He had spent the past ten years moving his growing family from house to house,
mortgaging what he owned countless times, and outright selling some of his property in Cork. In
the end, as the final tally of children became four boys, six girls, and three misbirths, “[t]here
were no more babies, and after eleven mortgages, there was no more property. John Joyce filled
his house with children and with debts.”9 When the family moved closer to Dublin in 1893 Joyce
was taken out of Clongowes, but it was soon arranged, with the help of a Jesuit who saw potential
in Joyce, for him to attend Belvedere College for free.
Belvedere was not as illustrious as Clongowes, he was still being taught my the Jesuits, to the
satisfaction of the young Joyce and his father. Located in Dublin, it had been founded in 1841.10
Almost immediately Joyce excelled and broke away from his peers and teachers. He won
academic competitions and spent the prize money (as he was to do later with any money that
came his way) on family and friends. On the other hand, he became the victim of verbal and
sometimes physical abuse from his peers. At Belvedere he decided to take Italian to add to his
Latin and French, a decision that would allow him to live in Italy years later; and, as so many of
his childhood details foretell his later life, Joyce chose Ulysses when assigned to write about a
favorite hero.11
Joyce’s sight was never good, but in 1894 a doctor advised him not to wear glasses, which he
wouldn’t wear for another ten years. The result, Peter Costello says, was that
What he absorbed he took in mostly through the sensations of smell and
sound—all his books are filled with these sensations rather than actual visions.
The small corner of a shop window he could see and appreciate; the wide vista of
the encircling mountains glimpsed at the end of so many Dublin streets passes
unmentioned.... [Consequently] much of his impressionable youth was passed
with restricted sight. The printed work may well have been more real to him than
the physical world around him. For the young Joyce, the world was not visual but
aural and literary.12
John McCourt, author of the definitive study of Joyce in Trieste, makes a similar point that
could be attributed both to Joyce’s poor eyes and, quite simply, his interest in the details:
Joyce was not interested in stunning scenery or in architecturally magnificent
cities, but in people and their cultures. His letters are devoid of physical
descriptions of the European places he travelled through and lived in.13
Joyce’s family was beginning to notice his genius, and his brother Stanislaus (two years
younger than him and his first supporter) ignored his assignments at Belvedere and instead read
what his brother did. Staislaus later claimed he, and not Nora’s Barnacle’s unpunctuated and
rambling letters or a forgotten novel by Dujardin, gave Joyce the inspiration for the interior
monologue. As children, while Joyce and Stanislaus fell asleep, they would talk and examine the
intricacies of their sleepy speech.14 Much of Stanislaus’ later resentment of his brother begins
here, as Joyce was obviously the favored son: he was given special treatment at home around
examination time and, considering the size of the family, he was still given his own room. And,
less than a mile away from home, was the City of Dublin Public Library on Capel Street, whose
stacks the young Joyce could credit as perhaps the true start of his independent education.
In November, 1896, Joyce attended the hell-fire retreat that comprises most of chapter 3 of
Portrait, and for a brief time he had his own religious revival. But this new strain of piety did not
last for long, and as he abandoned religion completely over the next few years, his faith now
became centered on art. He wrote his first books, the prose sketches of Silhouettes and the poems
of Moods. Both foretell, in the fragments that survive, his later journal of Epiphanies in prose, and
the poetry that would become his first published book, Chamber Music.
Peter Costello15 places the date of Joyce’s first sexual experience in the second week of
August, 1898. After attending a play on South King Street, he came upon a prostitute. Beginning
in that fall and probably for awhile after he met his wife six years later, he continued to see
prostitutes. The experience seems to have the double-effect we would expect from Joyce—both
disgust at the act but a necessary need for the experience; as Costello says, Joyce “was not a
sentimentalist; he was in search of a deeper reality.”16 Even here we can perhaps see Joyce’s
aesthetic at work: though this “deeper reality” could be both pleasurable or unpleasant, there was
no reason to judge (or avoid) the unpleasant for its own sake: life is life.
Joyce read voraciously, and his most important discovery was the Norwegian playwright
Henrik Ibsen, which Edna O’Brien says “ranks for Joyce as definitive as Saint Paul’s conversion
on the way to Damascus.”17 Barely known in Ireland (and where known, derided), Ibsen
convinced Joyce of an art beyond the simple moralizing didacticism he’d grown up with. And
even though a census form states Joyce and Stanislaus could both speak and write Irish18, this is
no more evidence of his devotion to the then-thriving Irish Revival than knowing Latin was
indicative of his Catholic faith. Because just as Joyce could absorb, reject, and use to his own
means the teachings of the Catholic Church, the same is true for the Irish Revival. And while
Joyce and Ireland are indistinguishable now, the only way he could truly write about Ireland was
by becoming a European, which required a different emphasis and a wholly personal (but at the
same time universal) mythology.
In the summer of 1897 he found the secular inspiration he needed in seeing a beautiful girl on
Sandymount Strand. Described in Portrait, she was the symbol that freed him to follow art and
nothing else:
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She
seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and
beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure
save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the
flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips,
where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down.
Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind
her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of
some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and
touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and
the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze,
without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly
withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the
water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving
water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep;
hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.
—Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.19
Joyce entered University College, Dublin, in September, 1898, partly on the money his
godfather, Philip McCann, left Joyce upon his death.20 The college dated back to 1854, founded
by John Henry Newman as a Catholic rival for the Protestant Trinity College. For various reasons
it never became anything of the kind, and in Joyce’s time it had only 300 students as opposed to
Trinity’s 1,100.21 Joyce befriended a handful of characters there, but his closest friend was John
Francis Byrne (Cranly in Portrait), and their friendship may have only flourished because Byrne
wasn’t much for debating—he simply listened as Joyce talked.22
In 1899, Joyce attended a meeting of the Literary and Historical Society, an organization
where students read papers on a variety of subjects. One night a student wrote that Henrik Ibsen
was evil, and that “the proper end of the theatre should be to produce elevation [that is, moral
elevation].”23 Joyce first attacked the paper in the discussion that followed presentations and then,
and almost a year later, he read his own paper, “Drama and Life.”
He was by no means condemning the previous student’s admiration of Greek tragedy or
Shakespeare. Rather he was pointing out that everything we call (and solemnize as) “history” was
once as mundane as present-day Dublin— but also that the present should be regarded with the
same solemnity as the past:
Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a
great drama....Ghosts [one of Ibsen’s plays], the action of which passes in a
common parlour, is of universal import.24
He was met with an audience of criticism, but he one-upped them that April when Britain’s
Fortnightly Review published his review of Ibsen’s new play. Being published and paid was one
thing, but the greatest compliment came from Ibsen himself, who wrote to his English translator,
William Archer:
I have read or rather spelt out, a review by Mr. James Joyce in the Fortnightly
Review which is very benevolent and for which I should greatly like to thank the
author if only I had sufficient knowledge of the language.25
Archer forwarded it to Joyce, and the depth of astonishment (and justification) he must have
felt can only be guessed. His response to Archer a few days later was still reeling from the shock:
I wish to thank you for your kindness in writing to me. I am a young Irishman, eighteen
years old, and the words of Ibsen I shall keep in my heart all my life.26
“Before Ibsen’s letter,” Ellmann says, “Joyce was an Irishman; after it he was a European.”27
Using the proceeds from his article, Joyce and his father traveled to London in May, and once
home went to Mullingar. This trip, cut from Portrait but included in Stephen Hero, has Stephen
Dedalus shocking the more rural Irish residents with statements like, “My mind is more
interesting to me than the entire country.”28 In Mullingar he began writing his first play, A
Brilliant Career, the only work he ever dedicated to anyone. Naturally it was to himself:
To
My own Soul I
dedicate the first
true work of my
life.29
He sent the play to Archer for criticism, and what little is known of the lost play today comes
in part from Archer’s letter. One criticism, that he first employs a large canvas only, in the end, to
focus on a few people, became the virtues of “The Dead,” Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.30
Perhaps Archer’s finest comment echoes all would-be fans of Joyce: “At present I am interested
and a good deal impressed, but also, I must confess, a good deal bewildered.”31
Between 1900 and 1903 Joyce began scribbling the prose experiments he called
“Epiphanies,” by which he meant
the sudden ‘revelation of the whatness of a thing,’ the moment in which ‘the soul
of the commonest object ... seems to us radiant ... a sudden spiritual
manifestation [either] in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable
phrase of the mind itself.’32
Joyce’s aesthetic, given in full in chapter 5 of Portrait, was the result of many years of
thinking. Perhaps first stumbled upon when reading Ibsen, the double-realization was that art
need not be moral, and that the lives of supposedly “ordinary” people were as worthy subjects for
art as kings.
By declaring that art need not be moral, Joyce did not mean to favor the creation of immoral
art; rather he rejected didactic judgments of any kind. Art should not tell us how to live our lives
but, by understanding and experiencing genuine works of art, our own lives are vitalized.
He felt proper art, rather than being kinetic, was static: it didn’t impel you to do anything.
Rather you stand away and, instead of judging a work, you simply behold it. Here he used
Aquinas’ three terms when apprehending beauty: you apprehend a work’s integritas, its
wholeness as one thing. Next, you understand the relationship of each of the parts to one another,
each of the parts to the whole, and the whole to each of its parts: its consonantia. Finally there is
the breakthrough, the claritas, which Stephen Dedalus calls
the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything ... You
see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he
speaks is the scholastic quidditas, or whatness of a thing.33
To help realize this, Joyce rejected the literal teachings of Catholicism but nevertheless
ransacked and made its symbols relevant to his secular art. He once remarked to Stanislaus,
Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass
and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying ... to give people some kind
of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of
everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own ... for
their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.34
And on another occasion:
Do you see that man who has just skipped out of the way of that tram? Consider,
if he had been run over, how significant every act of his would at once become. I
don’t mean for the police inspector. I mean for anybody who knew him. And his
thoughts, for anybody that could know them. It is my idea of the significance of
trivial things that I want to give the two or three unfortunate wretches who may
eventually read me.35
With help from Aristotle’s Poetics, he determined the proper nature of tragedy and comedy
(the latter which he came to prefer for his work), and distinguished three forms art can take on:
lyrical, epic, and dramatic. In the lyric, being “the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of
emotion,” the author and subject are one, and the experience is entirely personal. In the epic, the
events described are of equal distance from the author and from others, but the author is still
hovering there waiting to comment (this is the form most novels have always taken). But in the
dramatic, the author “presents his image in immediate relation to others,”36 and there is no
authorial judgment or comment whatsoever. This is the form Joyce chose for all his work.
His first attempts to put these ideals into words came in his notebooks of Epiphanies. As
Ellmann says, they claim importance “by claiming nothing.... [They seek] a presentation so sharp
that comment by the author would be an interference.”37 It leaves both the author and the reader at
the mercy of the material at hand, to where the style of a story or novel isn’t imposed from
outside of it, but only determined by the story itself. One could say that when Hemingway sought
to create “one perfect sentence,” Joyce, twenty years earlier, was attempting to do the same.
While at Mullingar Joyce began to translate the German playwright Gerhart Hauptmann, with
the hopes that the Irish Literary Theatre would put them on. To his annoyance he was rejected,
and told the theatre’s next offerings were to be in Irish. This inspired Joyce’s infamous article
“The Day of the Rabblement,” itself rejected by the college newspaper, St. Stephens. When his
friend Skeffington’s feminist article was also rejected, they decided to publish their essays
together. What Joyce accomplished with his article was in itself fantastic: he criticized the Irish
Literary Theater for their refusal to be European, but also hit hard at the conservatives who
disliked the Theater. He had alienated everyone, and, as Ellmann puts it, “found his private
mountain top.”38
After enrolling in the University Medical school after graduating in 1902, Joyce also began to
seek out the most important literary names in Dublin, starting with George Russell (AE). Russell
introduced him to Yeats, whom he told, “The first spectre of the new generation has appeared.
His name is Joyce. I have suffered from him and I would like you to suffer.”39 The two met, and
after listening to Joyce object to nearly all of his friends’ work (and finally his own), Yeats
delivered a long rebuttal. Joyce merely made one dismissive statement in response and then, in
Yeats’ words,
Presently he got up to go, and, as he was going out, he said, ‘I am twenty. How
old are you?’ I told him, but I am afraid I said I was a year younger than I was
[he was thirty-seven]. He said with a sigh, ‘I thought as much. I have met you too
late. You are too old.’40
In later life both denied Joyce ever said this, or in this exact way, but if Joyce didn’t say it he
should have. Yeats can’t have been much offended by Joyce’s behavior anyway, as he introduced
him to Lady Gregory and took up where William Archer left off in offering Joyce candid
criticism of his work.
That October Joyce began his medical training, but in a month was discouraged. Unable to
depend on his father for tuition and refused a job as a tutor by the school, he began to think the
school had it in for him. Ellmann’s biography is magnificent precisely for these moments of
insight:
Having decided that medical school in Dublin did not suit him, Joyce rather
illogically resolved to try medical school in Paris. Of course he wanted to go to
Paris anyway, but he always presented his caprices as reasoned plans. Whether a
Paris degree would be of any use to him in Ireland he did not investigate, and he
did not bother his head over other questions he might have asked himself, such as
how he could hope to pass chemistry in French when he could not do so in
English.41
He wrote to Lady Gregory for support, and she set up introductions for him in Paris. Joyce
talked to the Dublin Daily Express, who agreed to send him books to review. The only person to
dissuade him from this sudden move was William Archer, who flat-out said, “I am sure you are
making a mistake.”42
With his usual grand gestures, Joyce told his brother Stanislaus that, if he didn’t survive the
trip, to send copies of his poems and epiphanies to all the great libraries of the world, including
the Vatican.43 With this first departure in early December, 1902, and with all future ones, Joyce
imagined himself the subject of others’ scorn and consequently relished his status as a martyred
exile.
Once in Paris he read, wrote, and in a train station made the discovery of Emile Dujardin’s
Les lauriers son coupées, perhaps Joyce’s first literary source for the interior monologue.44 He
also sent letters home giving the strictest detail of his poverty and illness. Only twenty days after
his arrival he wrote to Lady Gregory, “My prospects for studying medicine here are not
inviting.”45 As he would so often in the future, he settled on giving English lessons, and wrote to
his parents about coming home for Christmas. His father promptly put another mortgage on the
house to pay for the trip.
While in Dublin again in early 1903 he met Oliver St. John Gogarty (Buck Mulligan in
Ulysses). Four years Joyce’s senior, they both had the same interests (writing, medicine,
blasphemy and obscenity), and like their fictional counterparts, they began to frequent the
National Library and befriend the staff there.
In the middle of January Joyce returned to Paris, though one wonders why. Aside from
reading Aristotle and Aquinas and becoming more clear on his aesthetic theory, he seems capable
only of pitiful letters home with remarks like, “Monday and Tuesday are carnival days and I shall
probably be the only one starving in Paris.”46 He did meet the playwright John Millington Synge
there, but complained that his Riders to the Sea was too short. Foretelling his own ambitions, he
said, “No one-act play, no dwarf-drama can be a knockdown argument.”47
By then Joyce’s mother had been sick for some time, and on Good Friday Joyce received a
telegraph from his father: “MOTHER DYING COME HOME FATHER.” Penniless, Joyce was
able to borrow the money he needed from one of his English students.48 And in one of my favorite
details of Joyce’s life, “He crossed from Dieppe to Newhaven and spoke broken English on the
pier to avoid tipping a porter to carry his bag.”49
Told in horrifically memorable detail in the opening episode of Ulysses, Joyce’s mother
begged him (and his brother Stanislaus) to receive Communion and Confession. Both refused.
What might seem an unforgivable cruelty to one’s mother is justified by Joyce as his fear of false
homage “to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.”50
Meanwhile his father took out another mortgage on the house to pay for medical expenses.
His mother did not die until August of that year, and between April and then Joyce wandered
Dublin. It’s been written that Gogarty was the first to truly encourage Joyce to drink, but Costello
suggests it was the death of Joyce’s little brother George, two years earlier, that did that.51 It’s
clear anyway that Gogarty at least encouraged Joyce to drink more often, and this enraged
Stanislaus, who was already jealous of the attention Joyce’s friends were given, and sick of their
designation of him as “James’s ape.”52
During the three months following his mother’s death, Joyce wrote thirteen reviews for The
Daily Express. Nearly all of them negative, and after a disagreement with the editor, he was told
not to submit anymore. He was turned down for almost every job he applied for, and refused
every job he was offered, and took some classes in law and medicine. He was even sub-editor of
the Irish Bee-Keeper, but it was a position that lasted “for about twenty-four hours.”53 His only
steady job appears to have been a year later, between March and June, 1904, when he was a
schoolteacher in Dalkey, an experience later transferred to the Nestor episode of Ulysses.
1904 was the year his life truly changed. First, in January, when told of a new journal looking
for submissions, Joyce quickly wrote and sent off the autobiographical sketch “A Portrait of the
Artist.” It was rejected with the words, “I can’t print what I can’t understand,”54 but as always
rejection was nearly as inspiring as acceptance, and he immediately retaliated with the idea of
turning it into a novel. First called Stephen Hero and much later A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, Stanislaus records the genesis of the book in his diary:
Jim is beginning his novel, as he usually begins things, half in anger, to show that
in writing about himself he has a subject of more interest than their aimless
discussion. ....He is putting a large number of his acquaintances into it, and those
Jesuits whom he has known. I don’t think they will like themselves in it.55
By midsummer he already had a large book on his hands, turning his life into art seemingly
as it was happening. He was also writing the verse that would comprise Chamber Music. How
this title was given the final seal of approval is amusing: he and Gogarty went to the house of a
widow one day, and Joyce read her some of his poems. She interrupted him for a moment to use,
behind a nearby screen, her chamber pot. Gogarty said, “There’s a critic for you!” and Stanislaus
quipped, “You can take it [the title] as a favorable omen.”56
Always a talented singer, Joyce now set to training his voice. As his father had sold the
family’s piano the previous year, Joyce took a room in town and was able (God knows how) to
put a down payment on one. In usual fashion he made sure to be away when it was delivered so
as to avoid tipping the workers. He entered the Feis Ceoil (Festival of Music), where out of
twenty-two singers he won the bronze medal. The famous Irish tenor John McCormack offered to
teach Joyce, but he refused. Later both his wife and his father would suggest he should have been
a singer instead of a writer.
The disparate strands of his life found their focus on June 10, 1904, when he met Nora
Barnacle. He guessed correctly from her accent that she was from Galway, and convinced her to
meet him in four days. When she stood him up, Joyce wrote to her. His first words are of a
perfectly Joycean humor, considering his later eye troubles: “I may be blind.”. He went on:
I looked for a long time at the head of a reddish-brown hair and decided it was
not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it
might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me—if you
have not forgotten me!57
So they met two days later—June 16, 1904, the day Joyce set Ulysses. He had finally met the
woman he would give the credit for having “made me a man.”58 Thanks to the letters passed
between Joyce and Nora in 1909, we know to what extent Joyce, beyond the spiritual and
emotional, meant this:
It was you yourself, your naughty shameless girl who first led the way. It was not
I who first touched you long ago down at Ringsend. It was you who slid your
hand down down inside my trousers and pulled my shirt softly aside and touched
my prick with your long tickling fingers and gradually took it all, fat and stiff as
it was, into your hand and frigged me slowly until I came off through your
fingers, all the time bending over me and gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike
eyes.59
From that moment on Nora was more sublime than a saint and at the same time dirtier
(because truly passionate) than a whore. As Costello says,
Here was a girl who, literally, took him in hand. Here was none of the trade in
sex he was used to from the prostitutes Fresh Nellie and Annie Langton, nor any
of the delusive virginal posturing which he thought epitomized the girls of his
own class. Nora was the first woman with whom he found he could be open and
free, each giving because each desired.60
The strength it later took not only to leave with but then live with James Joyce came in part
from Nora’s mother who, when she was perhaps twelve, did what Joyce’s mother never could:
she kicked her husband out of her house. By then Nora, born in 1884, had been living with her
maternal grandmother, and to those who assume her to be uneducated, it’s worth noting first that
most of us would seem so next to Joyce; and second that she did attend school until she was
twelve—the longest a girl could be educated in the free schools of the day.61
Two early loves both hardened her heart and made her ready for a man like Joyce. The first,
at twelve, was a crush on the sixteen year-old Michael Feeney, who fell ill with typhoid and died.
Joyce’s poem “She Weeps Over Rahoon” is his ode to Nora’s grief, so many years later, for this
young man she probably hardly knew. Then came Michael Bodkin—but at twenty he, too, died,
this time of tuberculosis. Feeney and Bodkin were the models for Michael Furey in Joyce’s “The
Dead,” and their deaths earned the sixteen year-old Nora the nickname “man-killer” from her
peers.62
Her grandmother had died a few weeks before Feeney, so by 1904 she had been living with
her mother and her mother’s brother, Tom Healy, for some time. The more one knows about Nora
the more admirable and complex she is: one moment she seems entirely adult in her grief over
two dead loves, and the next she’s an entirely normal girl of her day, running around with her
friends and playing superstitious games to foretell the names of their future husbands. Another
has her and her friends traipsing around Galway in the evening, though dressed in men’s
clothes—no minor thing in 1900 Ireland. Her Uncle Tom was known to scour the streets looking
for her to keep her in line, but Nora was no more a conformist than Joyce. So when a Protestant,
William Mulvagh, asked her out, she didn’t hesitate to deceive her Uncle. When her Uncle found
out and beat her, she wasted no time leaving home, leaving Galway, and moving to Dublin.63
She found a job at Finn’s Hotel and met Joyce soon after, and when not together they wrote
to each other. Brenda Maddox, in probably the only other biographical work to be as essential as
Ellmann’s, says,
The swift progress of their love affair depended upon a superb postal system.
There were five deliveries a day, with the first collection at quarter past one in
the morning. Joyce, who liked to write in the small hours of the morning, took
full advantage of the service.64
Nora’s letters, aside from winning Joyce emotionally and spiritually and physically, would
later inspire Molly Bloom’s monologue in Ulysses. “Do you notice how women when they write
disregard stops and capital letters?”65 he wrote to Stanislaus. So we have two views of Nora, just
from her letters: simple and seemingly uneducated, but also inspiring. Nora once expressed this
paradox herself. Tired of Joyce’s drunkenness in Paris nearly twenty years later, she yelled,
People say I have helped him to be a genius. What they’ll be saying next is that if
it hadn’t been for that ignoramus of a woman what a man he would have been!
But never you mind. I could tell them a thing or two about him after twenty
years...66
Whatever critics and elites may want to say about Nora, though, it was Joyce who stayed with
her. He wrote to Stanislaus in 1905,
You are harsh with Nora because she has an untrained mind. She is learning
French at present—very slow. Her disposition, as I see it, is much nobler than my
own, her love also is greater than mine for her. I admire her and I love her and I
trust her—I cannot tell how much. I trust her. So enough.67
While Stanislaus became jealous of his relationship with Nora, his friends merely mocked it,
while in her he saw the true expression of the simple and commonplace that he wished to make
the foundation of his art.
So in a short time Joyce had stumbled upon his first novel and met the love of his life. Now,
as a result of another casual inquiry, Joyce began another book. George Russell, enjoying the bits
of Stephen Hero he had been shown, asked Joyce for something “simple and rural.”68 Joyce
immediately wrote “The Sisters,” and not long after had already conceived of what would
become Dubliners.
Under the pseudonym Stephen Daedalus, “The Sisters” was published in August, 1904, a
year to the day after his mother’s death. “Eveline” appeared in September, and “After the Race”
in December. The editor of the newspaper, in true Joycean fashion, “asked Joyce not to submit
any more because there were too many letters of complaint from readers in both the country and
the city.”69 But Joyce was already off and could not be discouraged—he kept writing the stories,
only disappointed that he couldn’t make money from them now.
Joyce began to test Nora’s affection immediately, admitting to all his experiences with
prostitutes. If her love was real, certainly she could forgive him these awful actions, and when she
did, she became even more immaculate in his eyes. He was plain later when he said, “You have
been to my young manhood what the idea of the Blessed Virgin was to my boyhood.”70 And now,
reassured creatively and personally, he could safely vent his growing disaffection with his peers
and the literary establishment. Like “The Day of the Rabblement,” Joyce’s new “The Holy
Office” was rejected by the college paper, so he again published it himself. By insulting nearly
every contemporary from Gogarty to Yeats, this was Joyce’s most clear declaration of his rage
and equal delight at being so different (and no doubt superior) to them all. In part, he wrote:
I, who dishevelled ways forsook
To hold the poets’ grammar-book,
Bringing to tavern and to brothel
The mind of witty Aristotle...
But all these men of whom I speak
Make me the sewer of their clique...
And though they spurn me from their door
My soul shall spurn them evermore.71
The entirety of this piece necessarily put Joyce in an awkward position with most of his
friends. “It was difficult to borrow money,” Ellmann says, “from the people he had just spurned
for evermore.”72 So it is odd that in September Joyce moved in with Gogarty and a third man,
Samuel Trench, into the Martello Tower on Sandycove. A squat tower built the previous century
in the event of a Napoleonic invasion, it had only a large circular room as its living quarters. It
serves as the setting for the opening episode of Ulysses, and the tension between the three
fictional characters mirrored real-life. Already on their way to ending their friendship, one
wonders why Gogarty and Joyce bothered. While Joyce may have done so out of pride,
Stanislaus, in his diary, suggests Gogarty did so out of fear: “Gogarty wants to put Jim out, but he
is afraid that if Jim made a name some day, it would be remembered against him (Gogarty) that
though he pretended to be a Bohemian friend of Jim’s he put him out.”73 The next year, when
Gogarty tried to patch things up with Joyce, their friend Cosgrave told Stanislaus, “I wouldn’t
like to be Gogarty when your brother comes to the Tower episode. Thanks be to God I never
kicked his arse or anything.”74
On September 14, Trench awoke from a nightmare and grabbed a revolver and shot at an area
near where Joyce slept. When he awoke again and prepared to do the same thing, Gogarty
grabbed the gun instead, and shot at some pans that fell on Joyce’s head. Joyce took the hint,
dressed, and left the tower for good.
Now he became determined to leave Ireland, but was unsure if he should ask Nora to go with
him. He consulted his old friend Byrne, and after getting Joyce to admit the depth of his affection
for her, he told Joyce, “Don’t wait and don’t hesitate. Ask Nora, and if she agrees to go away
with you, take her.”75
Nora accepted, and they began their feeble plans to leave as soon as possible. Conveniently
leaving Nora out of the equation (since he knew his father would not accept his son running away
with a Galway girl with no name or money), John Joyce approved of the plan. Joyce then
contacted anyone he could for help. He secured the possibility of a teaching position in a Berlitz
school in Europe, and at Arthur Symons’ suggestion he submitted Chamber Music to Grant
Richards for publication. “Now I will make my own legend and stick to it,” Joyce wrote to Lady
Gregory,76 and on October 6, 1904, they left Ireland. Brenda Maddox’s Nora is so good partly
because she doesn’t mind second-guessing the inflated myth Joyce crafted for himself:
As they turned their backs on Ireland, at twenty-two and twenty, Joyce and Nora
had enormous courage. But so had 37,413 other people from Ireland that year.
Apart from the fact that he was going to forge the uncreated conscience of his
race and that Nora had put aside a life of religious training to go as his unwed
bride, they were absolutely typical Irish immigrants.77
They only had enough money to get to Paris, but a doctor Joyce had known there two years
before gave them enough to get to Zurich. Once there he found the Berlitz School didn’t have a
job for him to fill, and neither had they been expecting him. The director suggested trying a
school in Trieste, but with no luck. Finally Joyce found a job at the Berlitz School in Pola, an
international harbor south of Trieste. Aside from living in Rome a few years later, either Pola,
Zurich, or Trieste were to be the Joyce’s home for the next sixteen years.
Teaching English at the Berlitz Schools in Pola and Trieste provided Joyce with a far from
normal job. Its advertisements boasted qualified teachers available for “classes or private lessons,
or in the students’ homes, at any hour.”78 The irregular schedule this kind of guarantee brought
about no doubt appealed to Joyce’s nature, and as most of his lessons were held in his own or
students’ homes, he was able to absorb as much from his surroundings as his students were from
his lessons.
For all this, it’s a shame that the already financially-irresponsible Joyce was paid so little. In a
city whose average salary ranged from 150 to 400 crowns, Joyce made 190.79 And as most of his
students were upper-class, either in military or in business or, in a few cases, the children (more
specifically the daughters) of elite families, his difference in class from them was embarrassing.
However, as John McCourt says, the arrangement did have its creative advantags:
In order to teach English grammar, syntax, phonetics, and pronunciation, Joyce
was forced to analyze patterns that he had always taken for granted, so as to
render them understandable to students. In thus distancing himself from his own
language Joyce was in fact deepening his appreciation of it, and this process
cannot but have helped him as a writer.80
For now, though, he and Nora were newcomers in Pola. Joyce continued to write more stories
for Dubliners, which he sent back to Stanislaus, the two of them arguing points between letters.
Nora brushed up her French on the eventuality that they become rich from his books and move to
Paris.
Instead, Joyce was transferred to the Berlitz School in Trieste in March, 1905. At the time
Trieste’s population was 45,205, which broke down to 24,056 Italians, 10,388 Serb Croats, 4, 654
Germans, and 1,543 Slovenes.81 A good list of the languages spoken there are Armenian, English,
Spanish, Turkish, Sicilian, Maltese, German, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Czech, Greek,
Italian, and various dialects of Italian—all of which contributed to the Triestino dialect (and
McCourt isn’t far off calling Finnegans Wake “an exaggerated, exploded version of Triestino”82).
With this mix of culture and language, Trieste was also the gateway city to an exotic East, and
boasted a number of attractions, from three opera seasons a year to the bora, “that dreadful wind
that blew so fiercely through the town that ropes had to be stretched across the street to aid
pedestrians.”83
Nora, left utterly alone most of the day in a country whose language she barely knew, was
now pregnant. Joyce wrote home, “She has nobody to talk to but me and, heroics left aside, this is
not good for a woman.... I do not know what strange and morose creature she will bring forth
after all her tears.”84 It’s worth noting that Joyce could at least use his past, or Nora’s past, or his
new surroundings, as material. Nora, who probably had little interest in Trieste and no real need
to dwell on her past, was left with very little to do. Nora, Brenda Maddox remarks “might as well
have been talking into a tape recorder”85 when with Joyce, but this early on in their travels it’s
doubtful Nora felt very useful at all. When Giorgio Joyce was born on July 27, 1905, it only
seemed to make things more strained. Edna O’Brien, in her beautifully written but otherwise
romantic portrait of Joyce, is most true in passages about the writing life, and we can imagine
what Nora had to put up with:
Writers are a scourge to those they cohabit with. They are present and at the same
time they are absent. They are present by the fact of their continuing curiosity,
their needs, their cataloguing minds, their longing to see into another person, a
longing that is increasingly discharged into the work. The bulk of his time when
he was not teaching he was in one of the bedrooms, a suitcase lid on his lap as a
desk....86
On more than one occasion both threatened to leave the other. Meanwhile, Joyce forbade the
child to be baptized (though the ceremony did take place in secret when Nora went to Dublin in
1912).
By then Joyce had completed twenty-four of the planned sixty-three chapters of Stephen
Hero. And with the exception of three stories (“Two Gallants,” “A Little Cloud,” and “The
Dead,” all written later) Joyce completed Dubliners between May and October, 1905, and the
shape of the book was clear. He wrote to Stanislaus in September:
The order of the stories is as follows. The Sisters, An Encounter, and another
story [Araby] which are stories of my childhood: The Boarding House, After the
Race, and Eveline, which are stories of adolescence: The Clay, Counterparts, and
A Painful Case, which are stories of mature life: Ivy Day in the Committee Room,
A Mother, and the last story of the book [Grace] which are stories of public life
in Dublin. When you remember that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of
years, that it is the ‘second’ city of the British Empire, that it is nearly three times
as big as Venice it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world.87
He sent the stories to the publisher Grant Richards, though was doubtful they would be
accepted. And as Nora needed company, so in many ways did Joyce, and he was able to convince
Stanislaus to move to Trieste, assuring him he would have a job at the Berlitz School waiting for
him. Upon arriving, most of Stanislaus’ money went to his brother, and eventually Joyce took his
brother’s check without him ever seeing it. This only worsened Stanislaus’ already persistent
disapproval of nearly everything Joyce did—inability to live within his means and constantly
coming home drunk being the chief complaints.
To Joyce’s surprise, Dubliners was accepted by Grant Richards in early 1906, but almost
immediately a series of events began that would keep the book from print for eight years. First, a
printer objected to passages in “Two Gallants.” Three sections in “Counterparts” were
questionable as well, two about a man “having” or “keeping” a girl, another about “a woman’s
changing the position of her legs often, and brushing against a man’s chair.” Joyce objected that
these passages were less lascivious than the daily papers, which fed on such material. He then
tried the heroic route, telling Grant that “[I]f a change is to take place [in these laws] I do not see
why it should not be now.”88 Instead the objections were only added to, now in the use of the
word “bloody,” (e.g., “...she brought me two bloody fine cigars...”) to which Joyce said, “Is it not
ridiculous that my book cannot be published because it contains this one word which is neither
indecent or blasphemous?”89 In what was probably an ironic remark, Joyce asked Richards why,
amid all these specific words, he didn’t object to the entirety of “The Encounter”—so Richards
did, saying the entire story had to be removed, as did “Two Gallants.”
Joyce gave in with obvious reluctance to remove a few “bloodies,” but would not remove an
entire story. He wrote to Richards,
It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs around
my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in
Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves
in my nicely polished looking-glass.90
Frustrated with Richards and stalled in Stephen Hero, Joyce needed to move again. He found
a position in a bank in Rome and, leaving Stanislaus in Trieste, moved there in July, 1906. It is an
understatement to say he disliked the city. “Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to
travellers his grandmother’s corpse,”91 is one of his many remarks on the city. It didn’t help that
he found his job as bank-clerk so nauseating: he worked from 8:30 in the morning to 7:30 at
night, with two hours in between for lunch, perpetually wearing a long tailcoat to cover the large
patches on the backs of his pants.92 At the same time, however, in reading Joyce’s correspondence
one realizes that most of his letters to Stanislaus were written while he was at work: indeed he
always left out the fact that his superiors allowed him more special privileges than other
employees.93
Worse of all, the bank paid him once a month, so no sooner did he have money than it was
spent, followed by letters to Stanislaus for help. But the constant presence of the dead and of
history in Rome only made he and Nora more nostalgic for their own past in Ireland. A few story
ideas came to Joyce as a result: one, to be called “Ulysses,” and about “the putatively Jewish
Dubliners,” was given another seven years to gestate. A story that he did begin in Rome was “The
Dead.” “Out of their hunger and homesickness came the richly laden Christmas table of ‘The
Dead’,”94 Brenda Maddox says, and this nostalgia spread to all of Ireland, as when Joyce wrote of
the story,
Sometimes thinking of Ireland it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily
harsh. I have reproduced (in Dubliners at least) none of the attraction of the city
... I have not reproduced its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality.”95
He hoped to show this hospitality in “The Dead,” but this was not enough. The ending, where
Gabriel Conroy hopes to rejuvenate his marriage with his wife only to find out she has a previous
love on her mind, came from combining Nora’s memories of Michael Bodkin and Michael Furey,
both of whom died young of disease. For a man as jealous as Joyce this was a battle he could
never win—for how to defeat the influence of those already dead?
Meanwhile, Grant Richards now informed Joyce that he refused to publish Dubliners at all,
Nora became pregnant again, and Joyce was more than sick of Rome. Stanislaus, who had gotten
used to living without him, begged his brother to stay there, but Joyce returned to Trieste. The
Berlitz School there at first refused to hire him back, but when it became apparent that enough
students would take private lessons with him, they hired him rather than compete with him.
The acceptance of Chamber Music by Elkin Matthews in January, 1907, gave Joyce little
solace. “A page of A Little Cloud gives me more pleasure than all my verses,”96 he said, but was
probably being too harsh. The poems are definitely those of a young man, and far from the genius
of his other work, but at the very least Chamber Music remained a personal book for Joyce and
Nora, and in fact, when scholars began to visit Nora in Zurich in the 1950s, the only book of
Joyce’s she had was Joyce’s handwritten copy of Chamber Music. At the moment, however,
Joyce briefly considered removing the book from publication. When it was published it made no
ripples, selling less than 200 copies by 1913. But almost immediately, and continuing for the rest
of his life, poems from it and his 1927 volume, Pomes Penyeach, were constantly being set to
music.
In early July, 1907, Nora gave birth to Lucia Joyce. Joyce had apparently decided on this
name earlier, before any of his eye troubles appeared, so it is eerie that Lucia is the patron-saint of
eyesight. On the heel’s of Lucia’s birth Joyce had conceived a new plan to rewrite the entirety of
Stephen Hero in the form we now find Portrait. This wasn’t all accident, for while Nora was
pregnant with Giorgio he’d asked Stanislaus and other friends to send him information on the
process of gestation, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, now reworked into five long
chapters, became (in Ellmann’s words) about “the gestation of a soul.”97
In reading the first pages of the novel this is obvious: only the most base sense-experiences
are expressed, and slowly, as the book continues, the style grows up. This is a horrendous oversimplification, but the same man who wrote Ulysses and Finnegans Wake also wrote Portrait,
and it is just as intentionally crafted as his other books. And there is a balance everywhere, mostly
in the answers Stephen makes to his Catholic surroundings: the hell-fire sermon of the third
chapter by his theory of aesthetics in the last; his adoration of the Virgin throughout by his
adoration of the girl in the strand, and his abandonment of Catholicism by his embrace of his own
art.98
In July 1909, on the generosity of one of his students who paid for an entire year of lessons in
advance, Joyce and Giorgio set out for a six-week trip to Dublin, and without the presence of his
son it probably would have been a much more uncomfortable visit.
After an unpleasant visit with Gogarty, Joyce’s paranoid desire for betrayal came true in
another old friend, Vincent Cosgrave (grimly renamed Lynch in Portrait). Cosgrave now claimed
he and Nora had had an affair during the beginning of her relationship with Joyce. Joyce wrote to
her immediately, saying,
I cannot call you any dear name because tonight I have learnt that the only being I
believed in was not loyal to me....Write to me, Nora, for the sake of my dead love. I am
tortured by memories.99
The next morning, on no sleep, he was much harsher, asking if Giorgio was even his son, and
then, “Were you fucked by anyone before you came to me?”100 He confided in Byrne, who had
never “seen a human being more shattered.”101 He called Cosgrave’s story “a blasted lie,”102 and
claimed it was part of a plot by Gogarty and Cosgrave. Joyce begged for Nora’s forgiveness in his
letters, but his apologies quickly became tasks: “My jealousy is still smouldering in my heart.
Your love for me must be fierce and violent to make me forget utterly.”103
But just as the thought of Nora’s infidelity hurt Joyce, making the cause of it a secret cabal
between Gogarty and Cosgrave no doubt pleased him greatly. “Joyce was more than half in love
with persecution,”104 Edna O’Brien says, and for this reason alone the conspiracy theory is
unlikely. Brenda Maddox says,
Joyce nurtured the thought of ‘those bowsies’ conspiring against him and Nora,
but to do so required him to overlook a great deal. It required him to believe that
Gogarty, a successful surgeon with a busy practice, met Cosgrave after Joyce’s
unexpected return and plotted to break Joyce’s trust in Nora.105
And besides the leap this kind of thinking requires, it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility
that something did happen between Nora and Cosgrave before she and Joyce became serious.
Knowing of her previous history, and her aggressiveness with Joyce, there is no reason to
suppose it never happened; and just as there is no reason to judge Nora because of it, there is even
less reason to see the situation through Joyce’s poor eyes and condemn Cosgrave. Peter Costello
puts it best:
This universal denigration of Cosgrave is odd, for he emerges in Gogarty’s
memories as a more attractive fellow. And indeed what more had he said to
Joyce than the truth? He had gone about with Nora, accompanying her to Joyce’s
concert. He would not have been the first man to make a pass at a friend’s new
floozy.... As we have only Joyce’s version of this history, we can allow Vincent
Cosgrave a generous thought or two.106
Joyce and Giorgio also went to Galway to visit Nora’s mother, and before returning to Trieste
he signed a contract with Mansel & Co., who agreed to publish Dubliners. But he was in Trieste
barely a month before he returned to Ireland in October. A chance remark that Dublin, unlike
Trieste—a major film distribution center—had no cinemas, lit Joyce with a sure-fire scheme to
make some real money. He approached a group of investors, saying, “I know a city of 500,000
inhabitants where there is not a single cinema.”107 He offered to be the agent in Dublin—all he
needed was the money. They agreed, and after finding and renovating the site and hiring the staff,
Joyce left the management of the Volta Theatre to one of the investors and returned to Trieste in
December.
While still in Dublin his letters to Nora, first in the expected accusatory, jealous, pious and
worshipful tone, finally became astonishingly explicit. Even his dirty letters, “an extreme of
Joyce’s, and perhaps of human, utterance,”108 bear his unmistakable stamp. But, as extreme as the
letters are, there is no use in either of making too much out of them or being too respectable
(really just squeamish) to say much about them at all. Peter Costello is right that the letters
“distort what he know about Joyce,”109 but only if we focus on the letters more than we should. To
say, as Edna O’Brien does, that “they are as outright in their earthiness as the mystics are in their
ecstasies, yet they share the mystics longing for a couple to dissolve into one”110 is a bit silly. H.
G. Wells, writing to Joyce many years later, said it was Joyce’s Catholic upbringing that focused
his mind on dirty words, and these remarks say more about the true natures of the letters—far
from erotic and more adolescent:
You really believe in chastity, purity, and the person God and that is why you are
always breaking out into cries of cunt, shit and hell. As I don’t believe in these
things except as quite provisional values my mind has never been shocked to
outcries by the existence of water closets and menstrual bandages....111
Nora’s side of the correspondence do not survive, the fact that any of this was put to paper
shows, if anything, the immense amount of trust there was between the two.
Soon after accepting Dubliners for publication, it was apparent George Roberts, the director
at Manusel, was having the same fears as Grant Richards before him. Now objections were raised
to Joyce’s favorite of the stories, “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” where, amid perceived
insults on Edward VII, the Queen Mother is referred to as a “bloody old bitch.” Joyce rightly (as
usual) pointed out that Richards hadn’t objected to these passages when Edward VII had been
alive; now that he was dead, there was even slimmer chance of offending him. Joyce offered a
concession, Roberts refused, and publication was again delayed.
In July, he sent a detailed history of all the troubles he’d had with the book to various Dublin
newspapers. He hoped that by publishing his letter as well as the supposedly offensive passages
(as the Sinn Féin did) he would prove that they weren’t obscene at all. Roberts’ only response
was, in part, “I don’t think you quite realise a publisher’s difficulties.”112
Now Nora decided to visit Ireland, and Joyce asked her to talk to Roberts on behalf of
Dubliners. Once she arrived Joyce flooded her with angry letters for not writing to him
immediately. She was more satisfied than annoyed by this, though, saying, “well what have you
to say to Jim now after all our little squabbles he could not live without me for a month.”113 Joyce
came to Dublin soon after to talk to Roberts in person, and offered to make concessions to a few
of Roberts’ demands. Roberts not only refused but added to the list: now, any proper name of a
public place had to be changed, and “An Encounter” had to be omitted entirely. Desperate, Joyce
gave in, but the book never appeared. By October he offered to pay for the first print run of the
book, but Roberts insisted on an additional £2,000 of security. Now Joyce refused, and finally
Roberts threatened to sue him for knowingly submitting a book he knew to be libelous, with the
intention of suing Roberts when the book was rejected. Joyce walked the streets and considered
buying a gun to “put some daylight into my publisher.”114 Instead he answered Roberts on every
point, and, in a story Joyce would never tire of telling:
Roberts refused to publish it and finally agreed to sell me the first edition for £30
so that I might publish it myself. Then the printer refused to hand over the 1000
copies that he had printed either to me or to anyone else and actually broke up the
type and burned the whole first edition.115
Joyce claimed it was by fire, Roberts by shredding, but either way the message was clear: he
was neither welcome nor wanted. On his way back to Trieste, on the back of the Maunsel’s
contract, he wrote the wonderfully vicious “Gas from a Burner,” a monologue spoken by
Richards, which concludes:
I’ll penance do with farts and groans
Kneeling upon my marrowbones.
This very next lent I will unbare
My penitent buttocks to the air
And sobbing beside my printing press
My awful sin I will confess.
My Irish foreman from Bannockburn
Shall dip his right hand in the urn
And sign crisscross with reverent thumb
Memento homo upon my bum.116
He had it printed in Trieste and sent back to Dublin for his brother Charles to distribute, but
Joyce himself would never again return to Ireland. This final rejection by his country only fueled
his confidence even more, and he wrote, “What is certain is that I am more virtuous than all that
lot.”117
Almost exactly a year after the destruction of Dubliners, in November 1913, Joyce heard
from two people he’d been waiting for for ten years. The first was Ezra Pound. The American
expatriate poet was now living in London and, at the suggestion of Yeats, contacted Joyce. Pound
was associated with in England with The Egoist and in America with H. L. Mencken’s The Smart
Set and Harriet Monroe’s Poetry. Joyce sent him all of Dubliners and the first chapter of Portrait.
Both “The Boarding House” and “A Little Cloud” were published in The Smart Set, and Pound
successfully pushed for the serialization of Portrait in The Egoist, at the time edited by Joyce’s
later patron, Harriet Weaver.
The second was Grant Richards. Troubled by his conscience (a rare trait for any publisher) he
now agreed, again, to publish Dubliners, the only condition being Joyce had to buy 120 copies
himself and would receive no royalties until 500 copies had been sold. So on June 15, 1914,
almost ten years to the day since his first date with Nora, Dubliners appeared in a first run of
1,250 copies.118 And there was, in the end, no uproar over any of the passages that had kept the
book from publication for the so long.
With the help of the deadlines for The Egoist, Joyce made quick work on finishing and
polishing Portrait. He also began work on his only play, Exiles, which would be published but
performed only sporadically in his lifetime, and given a lowly status in his canon.
Now beginning to gain the recognition he knew he deserved, he began seriously writing
Ulysses. He had spent the previous seven years thinking about it, and would spend the next seven
writing it. Taking place on June 16, 1904, it is separated into three parts, the first with three
episodes, the second twelve, and the third three, with all but one of the eighteen (The Wandering
Rocks, from the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts) having a parallel in the Odyssey.
Part one has Stephen Dedalus at the Martello Tower with Buck Mulligan (Telemechus),
teaching school and meeting with his boss (Nestor), and afterwards contemplating the universe on
Sandymount Strand (Proteus).
Part two introduces Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly (Calypso). Afterwards, Bloom takes a
walk about Dublin and relaxaes in a public bath (Lotus-Eaters), attends his friend Paddy
Dignam’s funeral (Hades), visits the offices of the Freeman’s Journal as part of his job as an ad
canvasser—where he just misses meeting Stephen (Aeolus), and wanders ravenously for some
lunch (The Lestrygonians). We return to Stephen and Mulligan again who, with others, discuss
Shakespeare at the National Library, where Bloom briefly appears towards the end (Scylla and
Charybdis), and then enter the only non-Homeric episode, itself a set of eighteen vignettes from
around Dublin that serve as a microcosm of the entire book (The Wandering Rocks). (Peter
Costello makes the good point that Stephen disappears from the book now, just around the time
Joyce and Nora would have been out walking that evening.119) Bloom stops at a bar and musicroom (Sirens), has an unfortunate encounter with a violent nationalist and anti-Semite at a
different restaurant (Cyclops), and has a nearly opposite and erotic encounter when he sees Gerty
MacDowell (Nausicaa). We return to Stephen and his medical student friends at a hospital where
a child is born (The Oxen of the Sun), and part two concludes in the long hallucinogenic
adventure (it takes up nearly a quarter of the book) in Nighttown among the prostitutes where
Bloom and Stephen finally meet, the latter rescuing Stephen from his equally inebriated friends
(Circe).
The third part consists of Stephen and Bloom’s exhausted visit to a cab-men’s shelter where
the style (wordy and sloppy) matches their frame of mind (Eumeaus), followed by their walk to
Bloom’s house on 7 Eccles Street, where Stephen continues on and Bloom goes to bed (Ithaca).
The book finishes with Molly Bloom’s long soliloquy with her husband beside her (Penelope).
“A perfectly ordinary day,”120 Stuart Gilbert says.
Many of the more anecdotal Homeric parallels have been pointed out only to deride the
technique; one that comes to mind is “the cigar Bloom keeps brandishing in front of the citizen is
like the spear Ulysses uses to blind the Cyclops.”121 While these are bits of Joyce’s humor, and
jokes on Homer, they are also, for a man who wanted to solemnize the everyday, “the
ennoblement of the mock-heroic.”122 In fact Joyce favored a mistaken etymology for the Greek of
Ulysses’ name: a combination of Outis (nobody) and Zeus (God).123 The etymology may be
wrong, the but the point has been made. Ellmann elaborates:
For Bloom is a nobody—an advertisement canvasser who, apart from his family,
has virtually no effect upon the life around him—yet there is god in him. By god
Joyce does not intend Christianity; although Bloom has been generously baptized
in both the Protestant Church and the Catholic Church, he is obviously not a
Christian. Nor is he concerned with the conception of a personal god. The divine
part of Bloom is simply his humanity—his assumption of a bond between
himself and other created beings.124
Joyce’s method, called by T. S. Eliot an “anti-style,” was merely a more full realization of
what he had begun in Portrait, only now more complicated, with dozens of correspondences
holding each episode together. One example is Aeolus, where Bloom visits the offices of the
Freeman’s Journal. The episode is written between exaggerated newspaper headlines, with the
windy god Aeolus matched by the windbags of the journalists and the numerous presses going all
around them. Or in the Lestrygonians, where Bloom searches for a place to eat and food imagery
abounds until, as Joseph Campbell says, “you come out smeared with pie and grease and fish and
everything.”125 Or, as elaborated below, the Oxen of the Sun episode, the style (which follows the
progression of English prose from the seventh century on matches the subject-matter, gestation
and birth.
With all of these underpinnings, Joyce never planned entirely ahead, saying, “In the writing
the good things will come.”126 This of course didn’t stop him from adding to and reworking what
he had found—whereas many books are reduced from draft to draft, Ulysses grew by a third in
the proof stage alone. He also filled the book with numerous references and threads of thought
and speech that are never borne out or mentioned again in the book—the point being that the
book is life, where unconnected themes and thoughts crop up all the time.127
Perhaps the most important scene in Ulysses, Bloom playing Good Samaritan to Stephen at
the end of Circe, deserves to be looked at closer. Indeed, this gesture, placed at the climax of the
book’s longest episode, is the defining moment for the book as a whole, and the gesture has two
possible sources from Joyce’s own life, both involving a man named Alfred H. Hunter. Hunter,
an ad canvasser who was actually a Presbyterian with an unfaithful Catholic wife, was for some
reason mistaken as being Jewish—and so we have the early models for Leopold and Molly
Bloom. And it was only a few days after meeting with Nora that Joyce, hitting on a girl on St.
Stephen’s Green, was himself beaten up by her boyfriend. Ellmann’s version of events says
Hunter, whom Joyce hardly knew, came to Joyce’s defense and helped him to his feet and on his
way home.128 Peter Costello’s version (which sounds more convincing) has Joyce, the evening he
left the Martello Tower, going out with Nora, then visiting his medical student friends at the
Holles Street maternity hospital. From there they went to the brothels, where Joyce and some
others got into a fight, and here Hunter makes his entrance, befriending Joyce and taking him
home.129
Either way, it is so strange that a book exemplifying the beauty of everyday life, and which
ends in a chorus of affirmative repetitions of “Yes,” and which finally (as Stephen says), shows
“the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature,” 130 should have been so easily dismissed
as “dirty.” In fact the overriding theme Ulysses is that of The Odyssey: family life, be it negative
or positive. Stephen’s dead mother, his sisters, and his father, are on his mind all day; as are
Bloom’s daughter, wife, and deceased son—and even his own father, a suicide, resurfaces in his
mind in Hades. And buried in the details of the book, beside the more obvious literary and
historical ones, are probably hundreds of familial ones. As Peter Costello points out, the name
Garryowen for the Citizen’s dog in the Cyclops episode was taken from the father of Joyce’s
favorite Aunt Josephine. “It is all too typical of Joyce’s work,” Costello says, “that even the dogs
in them have an immediate personal connection with his family.”131
Bloom and Stephen, like Joyce, abhor violence—an important point, as this Ulysses and
Telemachus flourish simply on intelligence and good-nature alone. On his decision in 1933 to
allow Ulysses into the United States, Judge John M. Woolsey wrote that the book was difficult,
brilliant, dull, obscure, sincere, honest and frank.132 These words can be used to describe any life,
and as Joyce was to say later, “If Ulysses isn’t fit to read, life isn’t fit to live.”133
When World War I broke out Trieste was not the ideal place to be living. Stanislaus, always
more politically outspoken than his brother, was placed in an Austrian internment camp in
January, 1915. Joyce and his family remained in Trieste, but when his students and fellow
teachers entered the army and the school closed, he said, “Now that everyone in Trieste knows
English, I will have to move on.”134
Leaving their furniture and books behind, the Joyce clan left Trieste in June, 1915, and ended
up in Zurich, where Joyce was to write the majority of Ulysses. His family was not happy with
the move—Nora had to learn a new language, and the children were again set back in school.
Thankfully, with the help of Pound, Yeats, and others, Joyce was granted seventy-five pounds
from the Royal Literary Fund. His Zurich friends also helped him out with money; many paid for
English lessons they never received, and one friend remembers, “Joyce was sometimes
humorously indignant if a pupil insisted upon having a lesson he had paid for.”135
With sales of Dubliners tapering off, he now sought to publish Portrait in book-form, but
already he was running into the same problems that had plagued his previous books. Squeamish
printers had deleted whole sentences from its serialized parts in The Egoist. Duckworth’s, in their
rejection of it, said,
James Joyce’s ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ wants going through
carefully from start to finish.... It is too discursive, formless, unrestrained, and
ugly things, ugly words, are too prominent; indeed at times they seem to be
shoved in one’s face, on purpose, unnecessarily....Unless the author will use
restraint and proportion he will not gain readers. His pen and his thoughts seem
to have run away with him sometimes.136
With the help of H. G. Wells (who admired Portrait), Joyce was able to secure an agent,
whose efforts landed the American publication of Dubliners and Portrait, by B. W. Huebsch, by
the end of 1916. No publisher in England would yet touch Portrait, and finally Miss Weaver
offered to have the Egoist Press print it, and it finally appeared on February 12, 1917. Soon
afterwards his play Exiles was published by Grant Richards, though it remained unperformed for
the time being.
As a result of his patrons’ help, Joyce could now live as he wished, waking late and staying
out in the cafes. Zurich at the time was a strange crossroads of artists and intellectuals, and in
1915 the original Surrealists began meeting at the Café Voltaire before moving to Paris after the
war. Also, in the Café Odéon, Joyce and Lenin were both frequent customers, and it is said that
on one occasion they actually met.137
He continued with Ulysses as always, and began to bring his acquaintances more and more
into the process of its composition. He talked for a long time to a student and friend, Georges
Borach, and Borach noted much of what Joyce said in his notebook:
The most beautiful, most human traits are contained in the Odyssey....I find the
subject of Ulysses the most human in world literature. Ulysses didn’t want to go
off to Troy ... [and when] the recruiting officers arrived, he happened to be
plowing. He pretended to be mad....Then the motif of wandering. Scylla and
Charybdis—what a splendid parable. Ulysses is also a great musician; he wishes
to and must listen [to the Sirens]; he has himself tied to the mast. The motif of the
artist, who will lay down his life rather than renounce his interest.... On Naxos,
the oldster of fifty, perhaps bald-headed, with Nausicaa, a girl who is barely
seventeen. What a fine theme! And the return, how profoundly human! Don’t
forget the trait of generosity at the interview with Ajax in the nether world, and
many other beautiful touches. I am almost afraid to treat such a theme; it’s
overwhelming.138
Ellmann points out, “It is not surprising that Joyce’s description of Ulysses as pacifist, father,
wanderer, musician, and artist, ties the hero’s life closely to his own.”139
By now he had finished the Telemachiad (the first three chapters) of Ulysses, and sent copies
to Pound and Miss Weaver, who had agreed to publish it serially in The Egoist. The American
magazine The Little Review (run by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap) agreed to do the same,
and for a time it looked as if Ulysses would sail into literary history with no difficulties.
In 1918 Joyce and his friend Claude Sykes began formal plans to put on plays in English,
calling their troupe The English Players. Their first production was Wilde’s The Importance of
Being Earnest. This brought Joyce into contact with two men who would involve him in one of
the most ludicrous situations of his life.
The first was the British Consul in Zurich, A. Percy Bennet, whose permission the English
Players had to get to perform their work. Bennet already disliked Joyce for not reporting his
services during wartime. The other was Henry Carr, who also worked in the consular’s office. He
was hired as an amateur actor but was later offended by not being paid the same amount as the
professionals; he also demanded reimbursement for the money spent on his costume. When Joyce
confronted him in the consular’s office, Carr threatened Joyce, calling him a cad and a swindler.
Since Bennett would not remove Carr from his position, Joyce drew up a suit against Carr, who
countered, and Joyce countered him with a libel suit. The affair would continue for the next year,
and Joyce intended to see it, however frivolous, to its end.
Just as his court troubles were beginning Joyce met the painter, sculptor (and frequent model
for sculptors), Frank Budgen, who later wrote what is generally considered the best book on
Ulysses, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’. Budgen had no formal education, but while at
sea had educated himself. Even when Pound or Miss Weaver disliked a chapter of Ulysses,
Budgen (perhaps because he had the luxury of Joyce’s running-commentary on top of his own
instincts) invariably supported his work. The friendship that resulted from this kind of
relationship became probably the most important in Joyce’s life, and certainly the most
significant since Byrne back in his college days. Their other companion was Paul Suter, brother
of sculptor August Suter, and the three of them often spent long nights out, drinking. This
infuriated Nora, who thought Budgen and Suter were encouraging Joyce to drink.
Also to Nora’s annoyance, Joyce constantly talked about his work with his friends, “stagemanaging” conversations so that they centered around him or his book. When he asked Budgen if
there was any example of an “all-around character” in literature, Budgen put forth Christ, or
Hamlet, or Faust. Joyce knocked all of these down in favor of Ulysses (and, by association,
Bloom), who had been a son, father, and husband.
Since leaving Ireland Joyce had been infatuated with more than a few women; the first seems
to have been (as many of them were) one of his students. Annie Schleimer, whom he knew in
1904, traded at least a kiss with Joyce. John McCourt suggests it was Joyce’s experiences around
the upper-class girls of Pola and Trieste forced him
because of their sophistication, education, beauty and sexual ease—to reconsider
his rather reductive early visions of the feminine and to replace them with the
fuller versions of womankind we find in the later fiction.140
McCourt points specifically to Joyce’s posthumously published notebook, Giacomo Joyce
(written between 1912 and 1913), as a “key transitional text in Joyce’s canon” precisely because
it is the first place where Joyce begins to give a more complex representation of a woman in his
writing.141 Though the identity of the girl in the notebook is still debated, it was probably Amalia
Popper, who had been one of his students as early as 1908. Her father, a Jewish businessman
named Leopoldo, became a model (if only in name) for Leopold Bloom later on.
If, as has been suggested, Joyce and Nora’s sex life ended after 1913 or so, it makes sense
that Joyce now seek out woman instead of younger girls. In August, 1917, when he and the
family vacationed in Locarno for the benefit of Joyce’s eyes, he met a doctor, Gertrude Kampffer,
and gave her copies of Chamber Music and Portrait. When she refused his sexual advances, he
thought what worked with Nora might work with her, and gave her a letter describing his first
sexual arousal as a boy. When walking home with a nurse who told him to turn around while she
urinated in a field, Joyce became aroused at the sound; but as Kampffer was not familiar with the
terms “piss” and “jiggled” (used to describe his excitement), his confession was left
misunderstood and unwanted.
Now, in late 1918, Joyce met Marthe Fleischmann, and was astonished at how much she
resembled the girl he had seen in the Strand in 1898. He began to watch her, and at first she tried
to ignore him. He finally wrote her a note in French, and as each was already involved with
another, their correspondence was kept secret. She became important in Ulysses, as her limp was
given to Gerty MacDowell, and her name to the girl Bloom writes to, Marthe Clifford. On
Joyce’s birthday, 1919, she agreed to meet him in the afternoon, and Joyce planned for her arrival
in the manner of a romantic farce. He purchased a ceremonial candlestick lighted during
Chanukah, and then recruited Budgen. When his friend was leery of helping with Joyce’s
infidelity, Joyce said, “If I permitted myself any restraint in this matter it would be spiritual death
to me.”142 They set up the candle in Budgen’s studio and hung his paintings on the walls. When
Joyce suggested that the only thing missing was a nude “with ample buttocks,” Budgen quickly
drew one up, and in an uncharacteristic move, Joyce allowed that when Marthe came over they
were to address each other as “Jim” and “Frank” (Joyce rarely allowed anyone to call him by his
first name). She arrived, and after walking around the studio (looking embarrassed at the nude as
Joyce hoped she would), he accompanied her home. He told Budgen later, “I have explored the
coldest and hottest parts of a woman’s body,” but Ellmann suggests that sexual intercourse did
not take place, instead that she had been “fingered only.”143
Since at no point, it seems, did Joyce ever think of leaving Nora for one of these late
infatuations, the reason now given for them is the boring and merely creative one: he was writing
a book about a married couple, both unfaithful, but who always prefer one another at the end of
the day. A few times Joyce encouraged Nora to go with other men, but she never would, and in
these ploys we can see how totally Ulysses held Joyce. Brenda Maddox says: “It was more than a
book; it was a whole private world into which Joyce had withdrawn, taking his libido with
him.”144 Indeed, the book consumed Joyce in every way, so that when working on the Oxen of the
Sun episode, “his head was so full of images of half-born fetuses, swabs, and the smell of
disinfectant that he could not eat.”145
In the fall of 1918 Joyce had won the first case with Carr, for which he wrote a humorous and
bawdy broadside. Around his birthday a few months later he (finally) gave up the libel suit, and
as a result was ordered to pay 59 francs in court costs and 120 francs in damages, which he
promptly avoided doing. He was notified in April that if he did not pay the court would take
action against him and, again a martyr in his own mind, “made his plight known to the world,”146
writing letters to his agent, the British Foreign Office, friends in Dublin, and to Huebsch and
Padraic Colum (both in New York), exaggerating his troubles by saying 10,000 francs were at
stake.
Meanwhile, he brushed up on his Hamlet and read other books to write the Scylla and
Charybdis chapter in Ulysses, and then added the Wandering Rocks episode. Now having reached
Cyclops, he was beginning to get his first hint of negative responses from Pound and Weaver.
Pound also said that “a new style per chapter not required,”147 a strange thing to say halfway
through the book’s composition. As Joyce would do ten years later at the opposition to Finnegans
Wake, he wrote defending letters to both, assuring them that the various styles used were “not
capricious.”148
Joyce and his family returned to Trieste in mid-October 1919. It was impossible for them to
return to their old flat, which had been requisitioned during the war, so instead they lived with his
sister, her husband, and Stanislaus—all in one apartment. By now Stanislaus, released from the
interment camp, had made his own friends, and was no longer an attentive ear to his brother’s
ideas. As later with Finnegans Wake, he found the innovations of Ulysses boring and superfluous.
Not that Joyce minded—he instead wrote to Budgen as progress was made. Upon completion of
Nausicaa, written in the sentimental and flowery dimestore tradition, he described it as “a nambypamby jammy marmalady drawsery (alto là!) style with effects of incense, mariolatry,
masturbation, stewed cockles, painter’s palette, chitchat, circumlocutions, etc. etc.”149 He tried to
interest other Triestines in the book, but with this result: “Not a soul to talk to about Bloom. Lent
the chapter to one or two people but they know about as much about it as the parliamentary side
of my arse.”150
On one of the most stunning (and difficult) episodes, the Oxen of the Sun, Joyce wrote at
length to Budgen. Set in a lying-in hospital where a child is born, the episode’s themes are birth,
development, metamorphosis, and growth; to show this, the style itself grows up, and the entire
chapter is a chronological trip through the developments of English prose:
Am working hard at Oxen of the Sun, the idea being the crime committed against
fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition. Scene, lying-in hospital. Technique:
nineparted episode without divisions, introduced by Sallustian-Tacitean prelude
(the unfertilized ovum), then by way of earliest English alliterative monosyllabic
and Anglo-Saxon (‘Before born the babe had bliss. Within the womb he won
worship.’ ‘Bloom dull dreamy heard: in held hat stony staring’) then by way of
Mandeville (‘there came forth a scholar of medicine that men clepen &c’) then
Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur (‘but that Frankling Lenehan was prompt ever to pour
them so that at least way mirth should not lack’) then Elizabethan ‘chronicle
style’ (‘about that present time Stephen filled all cups’), then a passage solemn,
as of Milton, Taylor, Hooker, followed by a choppy Latin-gossipy bit, style of
Burton-Browne, then a passage Bunyanesque (‘the reason was that in the way he
fell in with a certain whore whose name she said is Bird in the hand’) after a
diarystyle bit Pepys-Evelyn (‘Bloom sitting snug with a party of wags, among
them Dixon jun., Ja. Lynch, Do. Madden and Stephen D. for a languor he had
before and was now better, he having dreamed tonight a strange fancy and
Mistress Purefoy there to be delivered, poor body, two days past her time and the
midwives hard put to it, God send her quick issue’) and so on through DefoeSwift and Steele-Addison-Stern and Landor-Pater-Newman until it ends in a
frightful jumble of Pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang
and broken doggerel. This progression is also linked back at each part subtly with
some foregoing episode of the day and, besides this, with the natural stages of
development in the embryo and the periods of faunal evolution in general. The
double-thudding Anglo-Saxon motive recurs from time to time (‘Loth to move
from Horne’s house’) to give the sense of the hoofs of oxen. Bloom is the
spermatozoon, the hospital the womb, the nurse the ovum, Stephen the embryo.
How’s that for high?151
Joyce finally met Pound in France that June. Once together they agreed they should go to
Paris “for a few weeks” to see about French translations of Dubliners and Portrait. Returning to
Trieste, he and the family headed to Venice, Dijon, and finally Paris. Rather than a few weeks,
Paris was to be their home for the next twenty years.
This move severed Joyce from Stanislaus almost completely. Already sour at his brother for
not dedicating Dubliners to him (as Joyce had promised he would), for removing his character
(Stephen Dedalus’ brother Maurice) from Portrait, and finally for never showing any gratitude
for supporting him and his family in Trieste, Stanislaus was happy to see him go. As Joyce put it
later in a footnote to Herbert Gorman’s biography, “The relations between the two brothers
practically ends here.”152
Once in Paris Joyce continued work on the Circe episode, and on July 11, 1920, he met the
woman who would eventually publish Ulysses. Sylvia Beach was the daughter of a Presbyterian
minister from Princeton. The previous November she had opened her famous Shakespeare and
Company bookship in Paris. Her close friend (and lover) was another bookseller, Adrienne
Monnier, and it was at Monnier’s house that Beach met Joyce. Only later did her bookshop
become Joyce’s favorite hangout, as it was already with the rest of literary Paris. Over the next
ten years Beach and her bookshop remained Joyce’s “bank, post office, coffee shop, library, and
home away from home.”153
On August 15 there took place one of the more humorous meetings in literary history. T. S.
Eliot, traveling with Wyndham Lewis, had been entrusted with a package from Pound that he was
to deliver to Joyce. They met Joyce in the afternoon, Giorgio with him. Wyndam Lewis’
reminiscences on this scene are priceless: after some preliminary talk Eliot rose histrionically and
made the formal presentation of the package. As Joyce unwrapped the package, Lewis says,
“Thereupon, along with some nondescript garments for the trunk—there were no trousers, I
believe—a fairly presentable pair of old brown shoes stood revealed, in the centre of the
bourgeois French table....”154 Joyce sent his son home and (partly out of embarrassment, partly
just being himself), took Eliot and Lewis out to dinner, spent as much as he could, and tipped
extravagantly. Eliot, who found Joyce to be exceedingly arrogant, nevertheless noted a week later
that, “He is obviously the man who wrote his books—that is, he impressed you as an important
enough personage for that.”155
By now Joyce had been receiving regular (and large) donations from an anonymous patron,
and ten days after meeting Eliot and Lewis more money came. Joyce was as impatient for the
opportunity to thank someone as he was to deride them, and he forced the patron to be
anonymous no more. It was Harriet Weaver. At first embarrassed, she soon made it simple that
her hope was to free his “best and most powerful and productive years” from the usual financial
difficulties.156 (Indeed, it is hard to imagine Finnegans Wake being written under any other
circumstances) It is estimated in today’s money that over twenty years Weaver gave Joyce nearly
a million dollars. Of course Joyce could never remove himself from financial worries, and while
Joyce and Weaver’s relationship would be strained for various reasons (her brief lack of support
for Finnegans Wake, her disapproval of his drunkenness and their differences over how to handle
Lucia’s later illness), they always remained close, and Joyce never forgot how much he owed her.
When he remarked later about Sylvia Beach that “All she ever did was to make me a present of
the ten best years of her life,”157 he could have said the same about Miss Weaver. For a man
habitually cynical about women, it was the presence of three (Nora, Weaver, and Beach) that he
could have never done without.
After quickly writing the Eumaeus episode, Joyce moved onto Ithaca, Bloom’s walk with
Stephen to his house. Rendered in the driest prose, the episode is comprised of a series of
questions and answers of such scientific exactitude that
Bloom and Stephen thereby become heavenly bodies, wander[ing] like the stars
at which they gaze. The last word (human, all too human) is left to Penelope.
This is the indispensable countersign to Bloom’s passport to eternity.158
Penelope, the fifty-page interior monologue of Molly Bloom, is the final chapter. Ellmann
notes,
To make sure that he could handle her childhood and adolescence on Gibraltar,
Joyce read all he could find about the island. The result was that when he met a
man from Gibraltar later, he was so well informed that the man refused to believe
Joyce had never set foot there.159
And in Joyce’s words to Budgen:
Penelope is the clou [star turn] of the book. The first sentence contains 2500
words. There are eight sentences in the episode. It begins and ends with the
female word yes. It turns like a huge earth ball slowly surely and evenly round
and round spinning, its four cardinal points being the female breasts, arse, womb
and cunt expressed by the words because, bottom (in all senses bottom button,
bottom of the class, bottom of the sea, bottom of the heart), woman, yes. Though
probably more obscene than any preceding episode it seems to me to be perfectly
sane full of amoral fertilisable untrustworthy engaging shrewd limited prudent
indifferent Weib. Ich bin der [sic] Fleisch der stets bejaht.”160
Initially, an American edition of Ulysses seemed the most likely, but by 1921 four issues of
the Little Review had already been confiscated and burned. On Valentine’s Day, a trial over the
book’s obscenity began in New York. The issue in question was the one containing Nausicaa.
Representing Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson was John Quinn, the literary benefactor famous
otherwise for buying original manuscripts, most notably of The Waste Land. But after a defense
Joyce always found inadequate, the women were found guilty and ordered to pay $50 in fines.
Worst of all, the decision made an unexpurgated edition of Ulysses in America unlikely. To the
army of those against the book, Joyce wrote humorously,
Now, as I hear, a great movement is being prepared against the publication,
initiated by Puritans, English Imperialists, Irish Republicans, Catholics—what an
alliance! Gosh, I ought to be given the Nobel prize for peace!161
His usual humor aside, the loss of New York trial left him dejected, and he went to Sylvia
Beach’s bookshop and told her the news. Suddenly she said, “Would you let Shakespeare and
Company have the honor of bringing out your Ulysses?” Joyce immediately agreed to the best
terms he’d ever gotten: a first printing of 1,000 copies and an astounding 66% royalties. The book
would be dependent upon subscribers ordering the book before its release.162 One of the best
refusals to subscribe comes from George Bernard Shaw:
I have read several fragments of Ulysses in its serial form. It is a revolting record of
a disgusting phase in civilization; but it is a truthful one... In Ireland they try to
make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr Joyce has tried the same
treatment on the human subject. I hope it may prove successful.... I must add, as the
prospectus implies an invitation to purchase, that I am an elderly Irish gentleman,
and that if you imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150
francs for a book, you little know my countrymen.163
Ezra Pound continued the debate with Shaw over the book’s importance, while Joyce told
Miss Weaver he was sure Shaw would subscribe anonymously.
Now that a publisher had been found, Ulysses was being edited, added to, and proofed. On
December 7, 1921, two-hundred-and-fifty people packed Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop, La
Maison Des Amis Des Livres, to hear the French critic Valery Larbaud give a brief biography of
Joyce. It was followed by an appreciation of Ulysses, and then sections were read by an actor.
Finally Joyce was coaxed from his hiding place behind a screen, and the most confident of writers
found himself embarrassed at their applause.
At the insistence of Beach and Joyce (and to the aggravation of Joyce scholars since), the
printer was rushed into finishing the typo-ridden first edition of Ulysses, so that three copies
would arrive in Paris on Joyce’s fortieth birthday. Reviews began coming in, at first from familiar
names. Eliot, in the D i a l , wrote that “manipulating a continuous parallel between
contemporaneity and antiquity” has “the importance of a scientific discovery.” Virginia Woolf
later remembers him asking, “How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy
of the last chapter?”164 There were naturally those who detested the book, and those (Gertrude
Stein among them) simply jealous of the attention the book was getting, but Joyce never cared to
counter any of it. Probably he had been thinking about and writing it for so long that he wanted to
forget it. This was the case with the technique that made the book: to those who were critical of
the interior monologue, he wrote indifferently that “it has served me as a bridge over which to
march my eighteen episodes, and, once I have gotten my troops across, the opposing forces can,
for all I care, blow the bridge sky-high.”165 Yeats later admitted that he had never been able to
finish the book, Hemingway thought it “goddamn wonderful,”166 and his brother Stanislaus
thought it a “merely technical monstrosity.”167 While Joyce was a celebrity (he was forced to stop
going to his usual restaurants), in many ways his fate was the same as his books: he was more
talked about than known, which explains why, when Lucia fell ill a decade later, some seriously
concluded that the author of such a “dirty” book could himself only be a dirty man, and wondered
if incest hadn’t caused her to go mad.
In July he and Nora went to England so he could undergo another eye surgery, and while
there met Miss Weaver for the first time. When asked what he was to write next, he told her, “I
think I will write a history of the world.”168 On March 11, 1923, he wrote to her, “Yesterday I
wrote two pages—the first I have written since the final Yes of Ulysses.”169 It would take him the
next sixteen years to come to the end of it.
By then he already knew the title of the book was to be Finnegans Wake, a secret he divulged
only to Nora. The title itself is indicative of Joyce’s ideals: he has taken a famous but otherwise
common drinking song about the wake of Tim Finnegan, a working-class bricklayer who fell
from his ladder (falls are everywhere in the Wake), and, by simply removing the apostrophe in
Finnegans, created the “pregnant ambiguity”170 that pervades the entire book: “it referred both to
the hod carrier of the ballad, who was miraculously resurrected by the whisky at his wake, and to
the tough, vegetable recurrence of human life and misbehaviour. The book was to combine the
affirmation of life, which he had always defined as the central function of literature, with the
scepticism about particular living beings which had always been natural to him.”171
Behind its 628 pages and mixtures of up to seventy languages, it still rests on its structure and
basic characters. Separated into four parts, it mirrors (among others) the four evangelists and the
four gospels, the four points (and the circle) of the compass. Part one has eight chapters, part two
and three have four chapters, and part four only one. It ends in the middle of a sentence:
A way a lone a last a love a long the172
and begins in the middle of the same one:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to best of bay, brings us by a commodius
vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.173
Joyce takes his four parts from the Italian historiographer Giambattista Vico’s New Science,
which separated history into four ages: theocratic, aristocratic, democratic, and the chaos that
comes and which returns us to the beginning. However, Joyce didn’t believe in these cycles
literally “beyond using them for all they are worth.”174 Vico also believed that the sound of
thunder (this must have been hard for Joyce to go along with) represented to early humanity the
voice of God, and the spark of human thought and consciousness. Ten times during the Wake
there are words175 100 letters long (the last being 101), each taken from dozens of words for
thunder from various languages. The significance of the last having 101 letters brings the total
letters in the thunder-words to 1,001—again, a completed totality plus one: a new beginning.
The stock characters in the wake begin with the archetypal mother and father: Humphrey
Chimpden Earwicker (HCE) and Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP). HCE is both the human father and
the sleeping giant in the Irish landscape; ALP both the human mother and the river Liffey who,
flowing by the sleeping body of her husband, stirs him into creation, into starting the world again.
But as with dream, and as with Joyce, nothing ever means just one thing, or even two things:
HCE is also Adam and Humpty Dumpty (who both fell), Isaac and Noah, Tim Finnegan and
Jonathan Swift, Parnell and Napoleon, or any king or patriarchal figure—the possibilities are
endless. Along with ALP, he also embodies every phrase that shares his initials (Howth Castle
and Environs, Here Comes Everybody, etc.) so as to exist everywhere and in everything,
constantly recurring, whether in landscape, human form, or thought. He is the simple bricklayer
of the popular song and the master builder of all civilizations.
The same with ALP, as young girl, mother, old crone, Eve, Isuelt, goddess, and the Virgin
Mary. She is also, as the river, constantly moving towards the sun, towards awakening—so it is
only appropriate that the book ends with her morning-thoughts, just as Ulysses ended with
Molly’s night-thoughts. Then their two sons: Shem and Shaun, prototypes of all brothers, Cain
and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joyce and Stanislaus, and consequently any warring principalities, any
opposites of thought or life: Shem the pen-man, or writer, or creative thinker, and introvert;
Shaun the extrovert, society man, and builder like his father. And finally the daughter Issy, or
Isabel, or Iseult—this is a world where your daughter, mother, and wife can become
indistinguishable.
With this backdrop Joyce could tell the history of the world, though in a less direct way than
any textbook. Early on he compared the intricacies of the book to the seventh-century Irish
illuminated manuscript, The Book of Kells, which Joyce called “the most purely Irish thing we
have,”176 in which letters and words become works of art themselves. Joyce frequently defended
the dense style he chose for Finnegans Wake, most often pointing out that it merely charted an
interminable night after the longest day of Ulysses:
In writing of the night, I really could not, I felt I could not, use words in their
ordinary connections. Used that way they do not express how things are in the
night, in the different stages—conscious, then semi-conscious, then unconscious.
I found that it could not be done with words in their ordinary relations and
connections. When morning comes of course everything will be clear again.... I’ll
give them back their English language. I’m not destroying it for good.177
He built into his book vast encyclopedias, and it is worth mentioning the designs behind a
few chapters to show this. One of the most famous, the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter178, is an
attempt, as Joyce said, “to subordinate words to the rhythm of water.”179 To Miss Weaver he
described it as “a chattering dialogue across the river by two washerwomen who as night falls
become a tree and a stone.”180 One of the only recordings of Joyce reading is from ALP, in whose
twenty pages 350 river names are incorporated. Unsure the day he finished it if he had captured
what he wanted, Ellmann says Joyce “went down to the Seine to listen by one of the bridges to
the waters. He came back content.”181
Since one recommended way of tackling the book is with a devoted reading group, it’s
appropriate that the Wake was written in a similar way. Often, sections of various books were
read to the near-blind Joyce, who was then given time to note what names would lend themselves
to his puns. Joyce elaborated on the composition of one section:
Nevertheless I had them retype in legal size, twice or three times this, with triple
spacing, section three of Shaun, and this, when it has been read to me by three or
four people, I shall try to memorise as to pages etc (there are nearly a hundred)
and so hope to be able to find the places where I can insert from the twenty
notebooks which I have filled up since I wrote this section. The notebooks,
written when I was suffering from my eyes or lately, are quite legible to me as
they were scribbled with thick black pencil, but the other ones, about thirteen, I
am relying on my improved sight to help me over.182
Similarly with Haveth Childers Everywhere183, a celebration of civilization and city
development, Joyce was read entries from the Encyclopedia Britannica on thirty major cities.
Others are crammed with information taken from children’s games, books, and magazines;
another of Euclidean mathematics.
For those interested in the Wake these anecdotes enlighten and fascinate; but they are only too
quickly used as ammunition by its detractors as proof the book is no more than a bloated puzzle.
But as John Bishop points out, in the end Finnegans Wake is one of the few books where the
reading (let alone total comprehension) of the whole is not needed to enjoy it. And its range of
allusions are so vast, from any of the subjects already mentioned to a hundred more, that a
learned scholar will catch some but be ignorant of those a pop-culture historian, or cricket player,
will catch easily.184
In April, 1924, the first bits of Work in Progress (the title Wake was known as until it was
published entire in 1939) began to appear in the new journal transatlantic review. Ford Madox
Ford was offered editorship of the journal under the condition that nothing of Joyce’s appear in it;
when Ford refused he was given editorship anyway. Still, with this apparent support, Joyce
immediately began to notice the unease over his new work that would later so worry him.
The rest of Joyce’s life until his death in 1941 was plagued by Lucia’s illness, constant eye
trouble and the constant threat of surgery. By 1925 Joyce had been operated on ten times already.
His reactions to his eye troubles varied; once he wrote, “In your letter you mention something
called warm sunlight. What is it? There are allusions to it in the works of great writers.”185 Other
times he was simply exhausted: “Twice a day,” he wrote after one operation, “they flash a light
before my eyes and say ‘You see nothing? Not anything?’ I am tired of it all. This has gone on so
long.”186 This, compounded with his financial difficulties and Lucia’s later illness, left him often
with little time or energy to write. When he did, it was with the assistance of others, with the aid
of magnifying glasses, or by covering sheets of paper with large letters. He did learn to type later,
but being so used to writing by hand, he could not be converted.
On Easter, 1924, Stanislaus visited him, and his opposition to Finnegans Wake hinted at the
uncomfortable group of friends, including Ezra Pound and Miss Weaver, who would also come to
have similar feelings.
Perhaps to involve her with the book so she would find favor with it, Joyce asked Weaver to a
request a section for him to write. She asked for one based “on a tradition concerning what was
reputed to be a giant’s grave of prehistoric Britain.”187 Joyce sent her what was to be the first
pages in the book, along with a key, but Miss Weaver made the point that “without
comprehensive key and glossary ... the poor hapless reader loses a very great deal of your
intention”; Pound (as always) was more direct, in one letter saying, “I will have another go at it,
but up to present I make nothing of it whatever,” and in another, “Nothing would be worth
plowing through like this, except Divine Vision—and I gather it’s not that sort of thing.”188 Joyce
continued to defend the book, saying, “One great part of every human existence is passed in a
state which cannot be rendered by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and
goahead plot.”189
In February, 1927, Miss Weaver finally admitted her bewilderment in a letter that partly
reads,
I am made in such a way that I do not care much for the output from your
Wholesale Safety Pun Factory nor for the darkness and intelligibilities of your
deliberately-entangled language system. It seems to me you are wasting your
genius.190
This news, from such a usually loyal supporter in all ways, crushed Joyce. He still went on
saying things like, “It is all so simple. If anyone doesn’t understand a passage, all he need do is
read it aloud,”191 but he also began asking close friends “Do you think I may be on the wrong
track with my Work in Progress?”192 Once he lamented, “The task I have set myself is dreadfully
difficult but I believe it can be done. O dear me! What sins did I commit in my last incarnation to
be in this hole?”193 At one point he became so hopeless about it he suggested a bizarre idea (to say
the least): the fellow Irish-writer James Stephens, who Joyce found out was born on the same
year, day, and time as he, and who also shared the first names of Joyce and his fictional
counterpart, seemed the perfect candidate to finish the book if Joyce proved unable. Stephens
accepted the odd assignment, but reassured Joyce he would finish it himself, without any
intervention.
Thankfully two people, the American couple Eugene and Maria Jolas, came into Joyce’s life
at just the right time and gave him the support he needed. Eugene had founded the new journal
transition, and even though Joyce quipped that “I imagine I’ll have about eleven readers,”194 it
was agreed Finnegans Wake would be published serially in it.
Then, in May of 1927 he met Stuart Gilbert, who had lived in Burma previously and
come to Paris to retire with his wife. He’d read sections of the French translation of Ulysses and
now offered to make improvements. It was these sessions and frequent meetings with Joyce on
the particulars of the book that gave birth to his study of Ulysses. In the fall of that year, Joyce
and the Gilberts traveled to meet Stanislaus and his new wife. Once again admonished by his
brother for writing an incomprehensible book, Joyce remarked that there would be “a sequel, a
reawakening,” one of the few hints of what might have been. Many suggest the book was to have
been about the sea, and Peter Costello gives on good reason for this. Having spent so many years
in the port-cities of Pola and Trieste, and later vacationing in dozens of sea-side towns,
Joyce saw the seas along the coasts of Europe in so many of their aspects that is
it not surprising he should have contemplated following Finnegans Wake, his
book of the Night, with a book of the Ocean.195
On July 27, 1927, Pomes Penyeach, a book of fourteen short poems, appeared. They were
released partly to assuage the virulent criticism Joyce saw against Finnegans Wake, but the book
did little. He complained to Miss Weaver,
My position is a farce. Picasso has not a higher name than I have, I suppose, and
he can get 20,000 or 30,000 francs for a few hours work. I am not worthy of a
penny a line and it seems I cannot even sell such a rare book as Dubliners
(Dublin). Of course I have turned down a number of lecture tours in America and
refused interviews.196
He was rejuvenated in October when he read Anna Livia Plurabelle to a group of friends. It
had cost him, Joyce said, more than twelve-hundred hours. Archibald MacLeish wrote to Joyce
after the reading, saying:
This pure creation that goes almost beyond the power of the words you use is
something I cannot talk about. But neither can I keep silent. This I am sure—that
what you have done is something even you can be proud to have written.197
In one of the more eloquent refusals of Finnegans Wake, H. G. Wells wrote to Joyce after
being asked to write some good words on it, as he had done years earlier with Portrait. Wells
replied in part:
Now with regard to this literary experiment of yours. It’s a considerable thing
because you are a very considerable man and you have in your crowded
composition a mighty genius for expression which has escaped discipline. But I
don’t think it gets anywhere. You have turned your back on common men, on
their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence and you have
elaborated. What is the result? Vast riddles. Your two last works have been more
amusing to write than they will ever be to read.... To me it is a dead end.... But
the world is wide and there is room for both of us to be wrong.198
In May, 1929, the volume Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of
Work in Progress was published: a collection of twelve essays, partly directed by Joyce, in
support of the Wake, followed by two against it. Along with this it became “the aim of all private
presses, to publish an excerpt from Work in Progress.”199 This was partly because larger firms
initially refused to publish sections, and also to obtain immediate copyright for the material. This
had become an issue since 1926, when it was found that an American, Samuel Roth, was
publishing sections of Finnegans Wake (and later Ulysses) without permission.
After the November 1929 issue of transition, the magazine was suspended for two years, and
Joyce wasn’t to publish in it again until 1933. Of the four books in Finnegans Wake, the first and
third were essentially complete, with only bits of the second and fourth done. The combination of
Lucia’s illness (which began to be noticed now), and his eye troubles that left him unable to work
on the book for long stretches, kept Finnegans Wake from completion for another ten years. He
sometimes went as long as a year without writing at all, and said the words came “like drops of
blood” after such a hiatus.200 But the writing never ceased to amuse Joyce—indeed, if it could
bring its author no pleasure what would be the point? Nora remembers,
Well, Jim is writing his book. I go to bed and then that man sits in the next room
and continues laughing about his own writing. And then I knock at the door, and
I say, “Now, Jim, stop writing or stop laughing.”201
In December 1930, Giorgio (who now preferred to be called George) married Helen
Fleischman, a woman eleven years his senior and already a mother. Initially married to a Paris
agent of Boni and Liveright and a friend of Nora, their relationship shocked the Joyces. In fact
few of their friends saw the match as an agreeable one; Helen seemed to use George and, when
they traveled to America to promote his singing career in the mid-thirties, many thought Helen
purposely tried to keep him from success. It is unfortunate that their marriage ended up as much
of a disaster as everyone predicted: in the late-thirties Helen had a breakdown and, like Lucia,
was committed.
For now, however, the marriage was advantageous for two reasons: first, Nora got her wish
and Joyce finally—that is to say, legally—married her. Ellmann is cloudy on the reasons for the
sudden marriage, but Maddox makes the situation clear: Helen didn’t want to be married to an
illegitimate child, which technically George was. When he and Lucia found out their parents
weren’t married they were beyond angered, and Joyce’s little lies over the years of having been
married in Pola no longer stood up.
But, most important to Joyce, the marriage helped secure a legal and unexpurgated American
edition of Ulysses. Helen’s brother, Robert Kastor, happened to be friends with Bennet Cerf of
Random House, and immediately upon hearing of Ulysses’ woeful treatment in America, he
agreed to talk to Cerf.202
So Joyce and Nora were married on July 4, 1931—John Stanislaus Joyce’s birthday. Both
appeared on the cover of the Evening Standard the next day, confirming Joyce’s distaste and
distrust for the press. Later that month Lucia began to act strangely again, but Joyce and Nora
assumed it was only stress over their marriage and a silly jealousy over Nora’s sister Kathleen,
who had been visiting with them that month.
That December Joyce’s father died, his final words a last answer to one of Joyce’s many
questions sent back home: “Tell Jim he was born at six in the morning.”203 Joyce immediately felt
regret at not returning to Ireland to see him in his last years, and wrote to T. S. Eliot, “He had an
intense love for me and it adds anew to my grief and remorse that I did not go to Dublin to see
him for so many years. I kept him constantly under the illusion that I would come...”204 He told
another friend, “He never said anything about my books, but he couldn’t deny me. The humor of
Ulysses is his; its people are his friends. The book is his spittin’ image.”205 Not opposing a
fiftieth-birthday celebration for himself, he still said, “Life is so tragic—birth, death, departure
(separation), sickness, death, that we are permitted to distract ourselves and forget a little.”206
But in the cycles Joyce always saw, George’s wife Helen gave birth to Stephen James Joyce
on February 15, 1932. Joyce wrote a poem to commemorate the death of his father and the birth
of his grandon, “Ecce Puer,” which ends:
A child is sleeping;
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!
But his birthday was marred again when Lucia, in a fit of anger, threw a chair at Nora. When
Lucia became infatuated with Joyce’s friend, the young Samuel Beckett, and claimed he had
toyed with her affections, Joyce forbade not only Beckett but any male visitors whatsoever to
their flat. But this didn’t stop Lucia from sleeping around, and Joyce tried to ignore how easily
his daughter was being taken advantage of. The source of her illness is unknown, but the Joyce’s
shiftless life had to be part of it: especially early on, there wasn’t a time when Giorgio and Lucia
weren’t behind in school, or suddenly forced to learn a new language, or simply living in a new
flat for the umpteenth time. For the next ten years there were various scenes and rows with Lucia:
in train stations, hotels, or in their flat. For a time she lived with Miss Weaver, who had no way of
caring for her competently. Later, she lived in Ireland with Joyce’s sister Eileen and her two
daughters. Each new setting proved disastrous, and only at the very end did Joyce relent and have
her committed.
Until then, however, Joyce defended Lucia to the point of entirely neglecting the severity of
her illness. Instead, he began to see it as the equivalent of his own gift, saying, “Whatever spark
of gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia, and has kindled a fire in her brain.”207 Finnegans
Wake and Lucia became intertwined in his mind, so much so that he became more sympathetic to
her the more doctors she visited, and even hoped the completion of the Wake might be met with
the end of her illness.
The first set of doctors, like many to follow, did nothing for her. Joyce encouraged her to
draw, which she did. In May, 1932, she was diagnosed hebephrenic—“a form of schizophrenia
characterized by hallucinations, absurd delusions, silly mannerisms, and other kinds of
deteriorations.”208 That fall a new doctor suggested Lucia drink seawater as a cure, which
appeared to work for a month. Before an operation on his eyes that could have resulted in
blindness, Joyce said, “What the eyes bring is nothing. I have a hundred worlds to create, I am
losing only one of them.”209 But he did not have the luxury of such an insight with Lucia—the
more apparent her derangement became the more Joyce refused to believe it, and consequently
the closer he became to her.
The only good news came from America: earlier in the year the American rights for Ulysses
went to Bennet Cerf at Random House. Sylvia Beach, who initially wanted a cut from Random
House for acquiring the rights from her, was now so exhausted from dealing with Joyce she gave
them up for nothing. Having spent the past ten years bending to Joyce’s every whim, she was
finally tired him, and the two were never close again. It was now up to Random House to make
Ulysses legal in the United States, and the case began in New York in November. Joyce also
signed a contract to publish Finnengans Wake with his old friend B. W. Huebsch, now with
Viking Press, but with this clause, a rare sign of appreciation:
If at any time during the continuance of this agreement, Mr. B.W. Huebsch
should sever his connection with the said Viking Press and either set up
publishing on his own account or acquire interest in another firm of publishers
than the Viking Press, then the said Author shall have the option of transferring
the benefits of this contract to such new firm.210
In September, Frank Budgen’s James Joyce and the Makimg of ‘Ulysses’ appeared, in
response to which Joyce wrote, “I never knew you could write so well. It must be due to your
association with me.”211 Other good news reached him in December: John M. Woolsey, the judge
presiding over the Ulysses case, wrote that “in ‘Ulysses’, in spite of its unusual frankness, I do not
detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist. I hold, therefore, that it is not pornographic.”212 The
book was to be allowed in the United States.
Joyce, who had always seen a clairvoyance in his own work, now saw the same talent in
Lucia’s apparently nonsensical remarks. But his desperation over her condition can best be seen
when he allowed Jung to have a look at her. Joyce had always thought Freud and Jung to be
quacks, and to Joyce this was proven in 1930 when Jung wrote a preposterous introduction to the
German translation of Ulysses. Jung, who had either not read or just not understood a word of it,
simply said it was an example of the schizophrenic mind. It’s hard to imagine Joyce
condescending to anyone else with so shallow a view of his book, and it’s a sign of how truly
desperate he was when he allowed Jung to look at Lucia. Lucia, however, inherited her father’s
bluntness in the face of stupidity when she wrote, “To think that such a big fat materialistic Swiss
man should try to get hold of my soul!”213 But when Jung pointed out the crazed nature of some
of the poems she had written, Joyce put Lucia in his own place and said “they were anticipations
of a new literature, and said his daughter was an innovator not yet understood.”214 Jung’s
treatment eventually came to nothing. “A man who had so misconstrued Ulysses,” Ellmann
writes, “could scarcely be expected by Joyce to construe Lucia correctly.”215
She was released from the hospital and early in 1935 spent some time with Miss Weaver and
Joyce’s sister Eileen, where she was increasingly unmanageable. Joyce and Nora finally
convinced Helen and George, who were in America with her family to promote his singing
career, to return to France at the end of September to help out with Lucia. Only George was able
to tell his father Lucia was incurable and should be committed for good, but to no avail. For the
next five years she was in and out of hospitals.
Joyce’s entire world seems to have been crumbling now. He lamented on Finnegans Wake
that “There are not ten centimes in my work. I can see nothing but a dark wall in front of me, a
dark wall or precipice if you prefer, physically, morally, materially.”216 In July 1936, he arranged
to have Lucia’s lettrines—elaborate designs for each letter of the alphabet—published to illustrate
A Chaucer A B C, in hope of provoking a cure. He wrote to Miss Weaver:
I will not do so [commit her] so long as I see a single chance of hope for her
recovery, nor blame her or punish her for the great crime she has committed in
being a victim to one of the most elusive diseases known to men and unknown to
medicine. And I imagine that if you were where she is and felt as she must you
would perhaps feel some hope if you felt that you were neither abandoned nor
forgotten.217
Somehow, with the help of his family and close friends, whom he sent on numerous errands,
Finnegans Wake was nearing completion. “If God Almighty came down to earth,” Nora
complained, “you’d have a job for him.”218 But he always remained loyal and grateful in his last
years to the group of friends he still kept.
Hoping to publishing the Wake on his birthday in 1938, he worked constantly at it. He
informed his publishers that he would divulge the book’s title when it went to the binder, “and no
sooner.”219 But Joyce’s birthday, and his father’s (July 4) both passed without the book appearing.
During that summer Joyce took up a game he had begun with Miss Weaver ten years before: to
guess the title of Finnegans Wake. At dinner that August Eugene Jolas finally guessed it. Joyce
looked deflated for a moment and said, “Ah Jolas, you’ve taken something out of me.”220 He
swore them to secrecy until he was done writing it, and cheered up for the rest of the evening.
When George’s wife Helen suffered a mental breakdown in September 1938, Joyce and Nora
visited her in Montreux. During a few days stop in Zurich, Joyce complained of stomach cramps.
He was told by the local doctor to have immediate X-rays, but Joyce ignored this and returned to
Paris. Once there he wrote the concluding pages of Finnegans Wake, its last word (the) being as
deliberate as the concluding Yes of Ulysses:
In Ulysses, to depict the babbling of a woman going to sleep, I had sought to end
with the least forceful word I could possibly find. I had found the word “yes,”
which is barely pronounced, which denotes acquiescence, self-abandon,
relaxation, the end of all resistance. In Work in Progress, I’ve tried to do better if
I could. This time, I have found the word which is the most slippery, the least
accented, the weakest word in English, a word which is not even a word, which is
scarcely sounded between the teeth, a breath, a nothing, the article the.221
After the exhaustion of coming to the end, and the approval of the few people he showed it
to, the closing months of 1938 saw the frantic proofreading stage so Faber & Faber could deliver
the book on his birthday in 1939. A party was held to celebrate its release, and his old friend
Frank Budgen even came over from London for the occasion. Ellmann justifies the book best:
Sleep is the great democratizer: in their dreams people become one, and
everything about them becomes one. Nationalities lose their borders, levels of
discourse and society are no longer separable, time and space surrender their
demarcations. All human activities begin to fuse into all other human activities,
printing a book into bearing a baby, fighting a war into courting a woman.222
On May 4 the book was officially released in London and New York, and the reviews ran the
gamut between supposing the book was madness, or reserving praise in light of subsequent study.
A few were cogent and praiseworthy enough for Joyce.
But then World War II began. Joyce bitterly complained his book he had spent so long on
would now be lost. He and Nora were in Zurich at the time, and that December they arrived in St.
Gérand-le-Puy, a village near Vichy (although even here, staying only a year, they moved four
times).223 Joyce was again seized with stomach pains. That Christmas at a party he asked Mrs.
Jolas to dance; when she hesitated he said, “Come on then, you know very well it’s the last
Christmas.”224 Although there was to be one more for him, he seems to have been aware that there
was little time left. Villagers referred to him as “that poor old man,” and fueled by his lifetime
dislike of dogs (as powerful as his fear of thunderstorms), he walked around the village with a
cane and a pocketful of stones, “my ammunition,” he said, against any approaching canine.225
When asked what he would write next, he gave his usual cynical answers that no one was reading
his new one so why should he write another—but the truth came in small hints such as, “Yes, I
think I’ll write something very simple and very short.”226 The year was occupied with correcting
misprints in Finnegans Wake, and trying to receive permission to go to Zurich, which was
difficult as George was of military age and Lucia had to be retrieved from a hospital in nowoccupied France. If his surviving letters are any indication, Joyce also spent just as much time
trying to get his Jewish friends passage to England or Ireland. Permission was granted for
George, but Lucia could not be released to her family. In late December, 1940, then, Joyce and
Nora left for Zurich with George and his son Stephen.
On January 7, 1941, he wrote to Stanislaus, who due to the war was forced to move from
Trieste to Florence. He gave his brother the names of a few people who might be able to help him
there. It was Joyce’s last letter. Two evenings later he was seized with stomach cramps and taken
to a doctor in the middle of the night, diagnosed with a perforated duodenal ulcer. He was
operated on and seemed to be recovering when he slipped into a coma. Early in the morning of
January 13, 1941, he woke to ask for his Nora and George, and then relapsed. He died an hour
later, at 2:15. When approached about a Catholic burial, Nora refused, saying, “I couldn’t do that
to him.”227 He was buried on January 15. As the coffin was lowered and Nora saw his face for the
last time, through the glass in the coffin lid, she cried out, “Jim, how beautiful you are!”228
Upon hearing of her father’s death Lucia said, “What is he doing under the ground, that idiot?
When will he decide to come out? He’s watching us all the time.”229 And indeed he is. As Richard
Ellmann remarks early in his biography, “We are still learning to be James Joyce’s
contemporaries, to understand our interpreter.”230 By simply showing us the world, Joyce has
shown us ourselves. As for the complexities of his work, his remark to Budgen that “the ideas are
always simple”231 is indicative of what he still means to us now: the combination of his work, his
life, and his letters gives us a sublime example of what it is to be a son, a husband, a father, a
writer (or member of any other profession) and, in the end, a human being.
Notes
These notes refer back, first of all, to Joyce’s books and the three volumes of his Letters, and the Selected
Letters. Since Joyce’s letters were occasionally pretty lengthy, the page numbers refer to where the quoted
passage occurs, not the page where the letter begins, as Ellmann does. In some cases reference to the
Selected Letters and a volume of the collected letters is given, as the Selected Letters, while including many
letters omitted entirely from the collected letters, also restores the occasional omitted passage from others.
References to Dubliners and Portrait are from the Viking Corrected Texts, to Ulysses from the 1961
Random House Corrected Text. The 1939 edition of Finnegans Wake is used.
Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together
Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of “Work in Progress,” 14.
3
Peter Costello, James Joyce: The Years of Growth, 49.
4
See Costello, 72-3; also Costello’s book-length history, Clongowes Wood College: A History.
5
C. P. Curran, July 14, 1937. Letters I, 393.
6
Richard Ellmann, Jame Joyce (revised ed.), 28; from an interview with Mrs. Eileen Schaurek, 1953.
7
Costello, 93.
8
Ellmann., 33.
9
Ellmann., 21.
10
Costello, 122.
11
Herbert Gorman, James Joyce, 45.
12
Costello, 119 and 129.
13
John McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 14.
14
Edna O’Brien, James Joyce, 30.
15
Costello, 151.
16
Costello, 150.
17
O’Brien, 11.
18
Costello, 190.
19
Portrait, 171.
1
2
Costello, 143.
Costello, 158.
22
Alphabetical notebook at Cornell.
23
Ellmann, 70; printed in Clery’s Dublin Essays.
24
Critical Writings, 45-6
25
Letter from Archer to Joyce, now in the Slocum Collection at Yale.
26
Letter to Archer, April 28, 1900. Letters II, 7.
27
Ellmann, 75
28
Stephen Hero, 246 (249).
29
“On the back of Joyce’s letter to Archer of Aug. 30, 1900, now in the British Library, Archer copied out
Joyce’s extraordinary dedication.”
30
Ellmann, 80
31
Ellmann, 80
32
Stephen Hero, 211-3 (216-8)
33
Portrait, 206-215
34
Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 103-4 (116)
35
Ellmann, 163; from S. Joyce’s notes.
36
Portrait, 214
37
Ellmann, 84
38
Ellmann, 90
39
Russell, “Some Characters of the Irish Literary Movement.”
40
Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats, 86-9
41
Ellmann, 106
42
My Brother’s Keeper, 192-3 (194)
43
Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses,’ (London, 1934; new ed., 1972), 155.
44
Costello, 207.
45
Letter to Lady Gregory, December 21, 1092. Selected Letters, 11.
46
To Mary Joyce, February 21, 1903. Letters, II, 29
47
Ellmann, 124; from Gorman notes.
48
Gorman, 108; Ulysses, 42 (52).
49
Ulysses, 42 (52); My Brother’s Keeper, 230 (227).
50
Portrait, 514
51
Costello, 177.
52
Ellmann, 134.
53
Gorman, 114
54
Eglinton, Irish Literary Portraits, 136
55
Ellmann, 147-8, from S. Joyce’s diaries.
56
Ellmann, 154; from an interview with S. Joyce, 1953.
57
To Nora Barnacle, June 15, 1904. Letters II, 42
58
Ellmann, 156
59
Selected Letters, 182.
60
Costello, 226.
61
Brenda Maddox, Nora,12-14.
62
Maddox, 15-18.
63
Maddox, 18-22.
64
Maddox, 30-31.
65
To Stanislaus Joyce, October 9, 1904. Letters, II, 273.
66
McAlmon, Geniuses, 168. In Maddox, 190.
67
To Stanislaus Joyce, 7 February 1905, Letters II, 79-80.
68
From George Russell, ? June or July 1904, Letters II, 43.
69
Ellmann, 165
70
To Nora Barnacle Joyce, 31 August 1909, Letters II, 242.
71
Ellmann, 165-67; in full in
72
Ellmann, 167.
73
S. Joyce, The Dublin Diary, 69.
74
Letter from Charles Joyce to S. Joyce, April 12, 1906.
20
21
Byrne, Silent Years, 148.
Ellmann notes, “Lady Gregory seems to be quoting this remark of Joyce in her reply.” (763)
77
Maddox, 46.
78
Quoted in McCourt, 31.
79
McCourt, 33.
80
McCourt, 21.
81
McCourt, 11.
82
McCourt, 51-53.
83
from Herbert Gorman’s biography, quoted in McCourt, 26.
84
To Stanislaus Joyce, July 12, 1905. Letters II, 95.
85
Maddox, 53.
86
O’Brien, 103.
87
To Stanislaus Joyce, c. Sept 24, 1905. Letters II, 111.
88
To Grant Richards, May 5, 1906. Letters II, 135.
89
To Grant Richards, 13 May 1906. Letters, II, 136-37.
90
To Grant Richards, 23 June 1906. Letters I, 64.
91
To Stanislaus Joyce, 25 September 1906. Letters II, 165.
92
Ellmann, 226
93
See also McCourt, 85.
94
Maddox, 78.
95
To Stanislaus Joyce, 25 September 1906. Letters II, 166.
96
To Stanislaus Joyce, 18 October 1906. Letters II, 182.
97
Ellmann, 297
98
Ellmann, 297-298
99
To Nora Barnacle Joyce, 6 August 1909. Selected Letters, 158.
100
To Nora Barnacle Joyce, 7 August 1909. Selected Letters, 158.
101
Byrne, Silent Years, 156
102
To Nora Barnacle Joyce, 19 August 1909. Selected Letters, 159.
103
To Nora Barnacle Joyce, 22 August 1909. Selected Letters, 163.
104
O’Brien, 78.
105
Maddox, 92-93.
106
Costello, 285.
107
Ellmann, 301; from an interview with S. Joyce, 1954; also McCourt, 143.
108
Selected Letters, vii.
109
Costello, 289n.
110
O’Brien, 74.
111
From H. G. Wells, 23 November 1928. Letters I, 275.
112
Ellmann, 315; a copy of this letter is at the University of Illinois Library.
113
Ellmann, 324
114
To Stanislaus Joyce, 23 August 1912. Letters II, 312.
115
To W. B. Yeats, 19 September 1912. Letters I, 71.
116
Ellmann, 335-337
117
Svevo, James Joyce
118
Ellmann, 353.
119
Costello, 224.
120
Gilbert, 3
121
Ellmann, 360
122
Ellmann, 360
123
Ellmann, 361; also from Ellmann:
“Letter to me from Aldous Huxley, 1957. Stuart Gilbert informs me he also heard this etymology from
Joyce; see Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1952), 263.
124
Ellmann, 361-62
125
Joseph Campbell, Mythic Worlds Modern Words, 99.
126
Ellmann, 360; from an interview with Arthur Power, 1953.
127
For more on this, see Ellmann, 366.
128
Ellmann, 161-62.
75
76
See Costello, 230-31, and 266.
Ulysses, 666
131
Costello, 30.
132
Ulysses, xvi.
133
Hutchins, James Joyce’s World, 139, and an interview with Kathleen Murray, 1953. (E, 793)
134
Silvio Benco, ‘James Joyce in Trieste,’ Bookman (New York), LXXII (Dec. 1930), 375-80.
135
Ellmann, 396
136
“A copy of this report is in the Slocum Collection at Yale, with a letter from Duckworth & Co. dated
Jan. 30, 1916, at Yale.” (E, 780)
137
Ellmann, 409; from an interview with Signora Vela Bliznakoff Pulitzer, 1954, by Lucy von Hibler.
138
Georges Borach, ‘Conversations with joyce,’ tr. by Joseph Prescott, College English, XV (March 1954),
325-27.
139
Ellmann, 417
140
McCourt, 5.
141
See McCourt, 196-206.
142
Budgen, myselves when young, 190
143
Ellman, 451; and: “Budgen made the remark to J. S. Atherton. See the latter’s “Facts, Fictions and
Fadographs,” Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 12, 1975, 1483.” (E, 783)
144
Maddox, 149.
145
Maddox, 171.
146
Ellmann, 456.
147
Ellmann, 459.
148
To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 6 August 1919. Selected Letters, 242, and Letters I, 129.
149
To Frank Budgen, 3 January 1920. Letters I, 135.
150
To Frank Budgen, 3 January 1902. Selected Letter, 245 and Letters I, 134.
151
To Frank Budgen, 20 March 1920. Selected Letters, 251, and Letters I, 139.
152
See Ellmann, 482n.
153
Maddox, 177; see also Noel Riley Fitch’s Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, the definitive account
of how truly devoted Beach was to Joyce.
154
Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 274-276
155
Eliot letters, 403
156
Ellmann, 491; letter from Harriet Weaver to Joyce, Aug. 25, 1920.
157
Maria Jolas, “The Joyce I Knew and the Women Around Him,” a section from an unfinished
autobiography, published in the Crane Bag (Dublin) IV:1 (1980), 82-7.
158
To Frank Budgen, End February 1921. Letters I, 160.
159
Ellmann, 501; from Myron Nutting interview in Oral History Project, U.C.L.A. Library.
160
To Frank Budgen, 16 August 1921. Letters I, 170.
161
To Carlo Linati, 21 September 1920. Letters I, 146.
162
Ellmann, 504; from an interview with Arthur Power, 1953.
163
From William White, ‘Irish Antitheses: Shaw and Joyce,’ The Shavian, II, No. 3 (Feb. 1961), 28-9. The
letter was first printed in Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company (1959), 52.
164
Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, 363.
165
Gilbert, 28
166
Ellmann, 529; from a letter in the Newberry Library, Chicago.
167
Ellmann, 531.
168
Ellmann, 537; from an interview with Harriet Weaver, 1956.
169
To Harriet Shaw Weaver, March 1923. Letters I, 202.
170
Rejoyce, 247
171
Ellmann’s introduction to Letters III, 4.
172
FW, 628
173
FW, 3
174
To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 21 May 1926. Letters I, 241.
175
e . g .
o n
p .
3 :
bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenen
thurnuk!
176
Power, From an Old Waterford House, 67, and interview with Arthur Power, 1953. (E, 793)
129
130
Ellmann, 546.
FW, pp. 196-216
179
Ellmann, 564; from Curran notes.
180
To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 7 March 1924. Letters I, 213.
181
Curran notes.
182
To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 2 December 1928. Letters I, 276.
183
FW, pp. 532.06-554
184
See John Bishop’s wonderful introduction to the new Penguin Classics edition of Finnegans Wake; also
his book-length treatment, Joyce’s Book of the Night.
185
To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 25 April 1925. Letters I, 227.
186
Ellmann, 573; from the diary of Helen (Mrs. Myron) Nutting.
187
Letters I, 246n.
188
Letter from Ezra Pound to Hilaire Hiler, March 10, 1937, in Letters of Ezra Pound, 292.
189
To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 24 November 1926. Letters III, 146.
190
Ellmann, 590; in a letter from Weaver, February 4, 1927.
191
Ellmann, 590; from an interview with Claud W. Sykes, 1954.
192
McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together, 251.
193
To Robert McAlmon, ?18 February 1924, Letters III, 88.
194
Ellmann, 588.
195
Costello, 13.
196
To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 14 August 1927. Letters I, 258.
197
Undated letter from Archibald MacLiesch.
198
From H. G. Wells to Joyce, 23 November 1928. Letters I, 274-75.
199
Ellmann, 614.
200
To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 22 November, 1930. Letters I, 295.
201
Ellmann, 710.
202
See Maddox, 255-57, and 260.
203
Ellmann, 642; from an interview with Eva Joyce, 1953.
204
To T. S. Eliot, 1 January 1932. Letters I, 311.
205
Ellmann, 22, from unpublished notes of Louis Gillet.
206
Gillet, Claybook for James Joyce, 132.
207
Letter from Paul Léon to Harriet Weaver, quoting Joyce, July 19, 1935. (E. 805)
208
Ellmann, 651.
209
Ellmann, 664.
210
See Stuart Gilbert’s introduction to Letters I, 38.
211
Budgen, Further Recollections of James Joyce, 4, 5.
212
Ulysses, 1961 Random House, xv
213
Ellmann, 679, from an interview with Jung, 1953.
214
Ellmann, 679.
215
Ellmann, 680.
216
Ellmann, 685.
217
To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 9 June 1936. Letters III, 385-86.
218
Ellmann, 699; from an interview with Samuel Beckett, 1953.
219
Ellmann, 707.
220
Ellmann, 708.
221
Translated from the French in Gillet, Stèle pour James Joyce, 164-5. See Ellmann, 712.
222
Ellmann, 716.
223
Maddox, 338.
224
Ellmann, 729; and: “For many details in the account of Joyce at Saint-Gérand-le-Puy I am indebted to
Maria Jolas’s essay, “Joyce en 1939-1940,” Mercure de France, CCCIX (May 1, 1950), 45-58, and to
interviews with Mrs. Jolas in 1953, 1954, and 1956.
225
Ellmann, 730.
226
Ellmann, 731; from an interview with George Pelorson, 1954.
227
Ellmann, 742, from an interview with George Joyce, 1953.
228
Carola Giedion-Welcker, “Les Derniers Mois de la Vie de James Joyce.” Quoted in Maddox, 345.
229
Ellmann, 743; from an interview with Nino Frank, 1953.
177
178
230
231
Ellmann, 3.
Interview with Frank Budgen, 1954.